New Public Management
New Public Management (NPM) is management change in institutional rules and organisational routines affecting expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labor relations, procurement, organisation and methods, and audit and evaluation (Barzelay 2001). It affects how government agencies are managed, operated, and overseen. Fundamental themes of NPM are derived from managerialism (Pollitt 1993) and economic rationalism (Pusey 1991). Principally, NPM is focused on the uses of market-based and business-like ways of public administration to achieve public goals. Although some scholars are skeptical of its applicability to the public sector, the prospect of NPM seems to be convincing (Hughes 1998; Mathiasen 1999).
The emergence of NPM in local administration in Thailand was found its roots in the administrative reform movement at the national level. Since June 1997, the National Administrative Reform Master Plan (effective from 1997 to 2001) focused on the reform values of streamlining and downsizing the public sector. Indeed, the core values of the reform plan were first unveiled partly by the globalized bureaucratic reform trends and partly by western-educated practitioners and scholars who influenced most of the reform agenda. Since then, the movement toward NPM has gradually appeared as political rhetoric at both national and local governments.
Nevertheless, NPM concepts at the local authority level were implemented selectively, rather than as a whole, systematic management change, as were the cases of some other developing countries (Samaratunge & Bennington 2002; Larbi 1998; Common 1998). As we shall see NPM components may be found in four cases discussed below. This is so probably because local governments saw the limitation of implementing overall radical change or perhaps they had a limited understanding of NPM. Yet, such restricted implementation has brought about the desired outcome for the respective local governments. The four illustrative cases of NPM initiatives are Huai-Kapi TAO, Phrae PAO, Rayong municipality, and PrayaBunlou TAO, respectively.