New public governance (NPG) or NPM with a governance face?
A careful reading of the new and old variants of public administration and
management suggest some convergence, thereby undermining claims for a new and
discrete ideal-type of public governance. If public governance is being reinvented, is
NPM and its variants under the general rubric of RPG the driver for converging on this
new form? In the case of NPM, Pollitt makes a strong case for rejecting this hypothesis.
In analysing NPM, he distinguishes four types of convergence from which a new
ideal-type could be constructed: “Discursive convergence”; “Decisional convergence”;
“Practice convergence”; and “Results convergence” (Pollitt, 2002). Pollitt finds that
there has been a considerable degree of convergence for the first two in the OCED
countries with limited convergence for the third and limited information on the
outcome of the fourth. However, the evidence base tends to be impressionistic with the
geographical distribution of the embrace of NPM being very uneven, limited mainly to
the Anglo-Saxon countries (Pollitt, 2002). Pollitt’s taxonomy is useful in suggesting
that the caricatured old and the lionised new are part of a continuum. A similar
taxonomy would be useful in assessing the opportunities for post-bureaucratic
organizational forms and their trajectory in the public domain.
Taking up the apparent failures of public administration and restructured public
governance, Osborne and others propose NPG as an alternative discourse to traditional
public administration and NPM. Drawing on organisational sociology and network