NPM: more than a doctrine
The fact that an idea such as “performance” or “merit pay” can be so differently interpreted
and applied in practice also warns against treating all the tools and instruments of NPM as
expressions of one underlying doctrine, as discussed in chapter I; they can be adapted and
used for many purposes. The transformation of NPM in local settings occurs partly because
these tools, once uncoupled from the underlying doctrine, are open to multiple uses and
extensions. For instance, adherence to civil service stability and continuity and to norms of
mutuality and reciprocity are so strong in some political cultures that instruments stressing
competition and self-management are antithetical even if the aims of improved efficiency and
performance are shared. The Republic of Korea, for example, has adopted a model of public
sector reform that avowedly espouses NPM principles12 while moving in a more cautious,
piecemeal manner in importing its tool-kit.
NPM instruments or tools applied to a local setting may even mutate into something
quite different.13 Thus, when the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region of China implemented performance-based rewards, it did so in order to encourage and
reward teams of civil servants jointly responsible for a successful outcome rather than to
“incentivize” individuals. This may reflect cultural norms that frown on excesses of competition
in the work place (as distinct from the marketplace). A common pitfall in assessing the
appropriateness of NPM for developing countries is that what appears “on the ground” as an
initiative in the style of NPM is often, in fact, something very different because the underlying
problems being addressed are different. Strange hybrids crop up in such cases.
Evaluating such reforms as a case of NPM would miss the point: they apply a surface
veneer of NPM doctrine to problems other than those that such a doctrine directly
addresses. In the presence of such examples of the mismatch between problems on the ground
and those that NPM addresses, it could be argued that many attempts to implement NPM in
developing countries may be doomed from the start. As just illustrated, many local problems