2024年3月16日发(作者：)

(含：英文原文及中文译文)

文献出处： Public Personnel Management, 12(2):159-166.

英文原文

New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping with the New

Political Governance in Canada

Peter Aucoin

A tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance,

including good public administration, has long been assumed by those who

regard the structures and practices advocated and brought about by NPM as

departing from the principles and norms of good governance that underpinned

traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated

(Savoie 2008).

As this dynamic has played out over the past three decades, however, there

emerged an even more significant challenge not only to the traditional structures,

practices and values of the professional, non-partisan public service but also to

those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide, if not universal,

acceptance as positive development in public administration. This challenge is

what I call New Political Governance (NPG). It is NPG, and not NPM, I argue, that

constitutes the principal threat to good governance, including good public

administration, and thus the Quality of Government (QoG) as defined by Rothstein

and Teorell (2008). It is a threat to the extent that partisans in government,

sometimes overtly, mostly covertly, seek to use and override the public service –

an impartial institution of government – to better secure their partisan advantage

(Campbell 2007; MacDermott 2008 a, 2008b). In so doing, these governors engage

in a politicization of the public service and its administration of public business

that constitutes a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine good

governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an

intervening factor insofar as NPM reforms, among other reforms of the last three

decades, have had the effect of publicly exposing the public service in ways that

have made it more vulnerable to political pressures on the part of the political

executive.

I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at the case of Canada, but

with a number of comparative Westminster references. I consider the

phenomenon to be an international one, affecting most, if not all, Western

democracies. The pressures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The

responses vary somewhat because of political leadership and the institutional

differences between systems, even in the Westminster systems. The phenomenon

must also be viewed in the context of time, given both the emergence of the

pressures that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new management-focused

approach to public administration, and the emergence of the different pressures

that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach to governance with

important implications for public administration, and especially for impartiality,

performance and accountability.