Nuevo Modelo de Gestión Pública

El término La nueva gestión pública fue acuñada por académicos del Reino Unido y Australia (Hood 1991 y Hood y Jackson 1991), que trabajaban en las áreas de administración pública.. Ahora bien, el origen de este nuevo término fue proponer un nuevo punto de vista hacia el diseño organizacional en el sector público, sin embargo después de una década, el significado de este término en las discusiones y debates se hizo múltiple.

Algunos académicos optan por definirlo como la introducción de una nueva economía institucional a la gestión pública y otros lo utilizaron para referirse a cambios de patrones en la formulación de políticas. Antes de hacer un esfuerzo por comprender mejor los diversos aspectos de la Nueva Gestión Pública, veamos en qué se diferencia de la administración pública tradicional.

La nueva gestión pública que surgió en el decenio de 1980 representó un intento de hacer que el sector público fuera más empresarial y de mejorar la eficiencia del Gobierno, tomando prestadas ideas y modelos de gestión del sector privado. Enfatizó la centralidad de los ciudadanos que eran destinatarios de los servicios o clientes del sector público.

El nuevo sistema de gestión pública también proponía un control más descentralizado de los recursos y la exploración de otros modelos de prestación de servicios para lograr mejores resultados, incluida una estructura de cuasi mercado en la que los proveedores de servicios públicos y privados competían entre sí en un intento de proporcionar servicios mejores y más rápidos. [For e.g. In UK the purchase and provision of healthcare was split up between National Health Services or NHS and Government funded GP fund holders, this increased efficiency as the hospitals now needed to provide low cost procedures to win both patients and funds.)

The core themes for the New Public Management were:

• A strong focus on financial control, value for money and increasing efficiency
• A command and control mode of functioning, identifying and setting targets and continuance monitoring of performance, handing over the power to the senior management
• Introducing audits at both financial and professional levels, using transparent means to review performances, setting benchmarks, using protocols to ameliorate professional behavior
• Greater customer orientation and responsiveness and increasing the scope of roles played by non public sector providers
• Deregulating the labor market, replacing collective agreements to individual rewards packages at senior levels combined with short term contracts
• Discouraging the self regulatory power of the professionals and handing over the power from individuals to management
• Encouraging more entrepreneurial management than beurocracy with high retrospective accountability requirements upwards
• Introducing new forms of corporate governance, introducing a board model of functioning and concentrating the power to the strategic core of the organization

With changing times newer aspects were included in the NPM model mentioned above as well and what the scholars term as NPM model 2 was brought in. The critical aspects of this new model were:

• Introduction of a more elaborate and evolved quasi-market system
• Creation of more fragmented or loosely contracted public sector organizations at the local level setting in a change from management of hierarchy to management of contract
• Distinguishing between the small strategic core and the large organizational periphery, market testing and contracting out the non strategic functions
• Delayering and downsizing
• Introduction of new managerial concepts like Management by Influence, creating network for of organizations, creating strategic alliances between the organizations
• Moving away from standardized service forms to more flexible and varied service forms

Now, as more and more work was done in the areas of Human Resources and Relations and popular texts which stressed on the need of excellence, the importance of organizational culture, values, vision and the concept of Learning Organization introduced by Peter Senge (1990) influenced the new public management as well and therefore suitable changed were also suggested in the theory by the scholars.

• In a bottom up form of organization- Organizational development and learning was gaining importance. Organizational culture was seen as a glue which holds the organization together, judging the performance by results etc were the new point of views
• In the top down form of organization- Securing changes in organizational culture was cited as important, clarifying and projecting the vision and leadership from top to down was asked for, private sector emerged as a role model for the neo style public sector, training, corporate logos, communication strategies, assertive HR and all the other aspects that are characteristic jargon of private sector were encouraged to be adopted

So, basically the new public management was a radical movement to change not just the way a public sector functions but also the entire perception about it.

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