1 New Public Management and New Public

Governance: Finding the Balance

peter auco in

The New Public Management (NPM) that emerged over the past
twenty-five years in the Anglo-American systems, but especially in
the four major Westminster systems of Australia, Britain, Canada, and
New Zealand, was new in several respects, especially in the extent to
which it emphasized the ‘management’ of resources and operations
over the ‘administration’ of processes and procedures. Management
was regarded as an active, even proactive, endeavour in the pursuit of
economy, efficiency, and effectiveness; administration was seen as
passive compliance with established and standardized procedures.
The new was pitted against the old, the innovative against the tradi-
tional.
The rhetoric associated with NPM called into question the classic
bureaucratic paradigm of a professional, non-partisan, and career
public service. This classic paradigm assumed a public service that
both advised ministers on matters of public policy and implemented
the government’s public policies through departments they directly
administered. The links between ministers and their departmental pub-
lic servants were thus close, even though the public service was neutral
in terms of partisan politics. Public servants possessed great influence
because they advised their political masters. But they were restrained
in exercising personal discretion in the management and delivery of
public services by centrally prescribed and monitored administrative
rules and regulations that governed the deployment of financial and
human resources. Public servants in this model administered systems,
processes, and procedures; they did not manage much – at least, not on
their own individual accord. They were administrators, not managers.
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 17

NPM promised to change all this.1 A new paradigm of management

would replace traditional public administration.2
NPM is hardly new any longer, but there has not emerged another
ascendant paradigm in public administration.3 In several respects,
there are new iterations of public management reform, given that
reform remains on the agenda as governments and their public services
continue to pursue improvements in management performance, policy
and program implementation, and outcomes or results. There is now,
for instance, a greater recognition of the need to provide better service
delivery to citizens, and not merely to secure greater economy and effi-
ciency in government operations. Canada has emerged as a leader on
this front. In Britain and New Zealand, where at the outset of NPM the
focus was essentially on efforts to combat budgetary deficits and debt
by streamlining the state, its programs, and the cost of their delivery,
there is a new concern for achieving better services and outcomes that
citizens demand. At the same time, NPM’s agenda remains relevant
because everywhere the effectiveness of the administration of the pub-
lic’s business constitutes a significant factor in a country’s achievement
of economic prosperity and social well-being. But in addition to NPM,
there has emerged what I call a ‘new public governance’ (NPG) that
has brought forth a new architecture for public administration that, in
several respects, challenges NPM.
Ken Kernaghan has been a leading figure in what Don Kettl4 has
called the ‘global public management revolution,’ a revolution that
encompasses NPM. Kernaghan is one of those few scholars in public
administration who recognized long ago that public administration
requires that public servants, as administrators, be able to manage. His
early work prefigured NPM; his later work centred on the most critical
management components of NPM. At the same time, he always
acknowledged that public managers manage not just any kind of busi-
ness but rather the public’s business. As such, reforms that seek to
improve the management dimension of public administration must
always be balanced by attention to the values and ethics of the public
service dimension of public administration. Not surprisingly, Ker-
naghan has never been an apostle of simply ‘letting the managers
manage’; he has always cautioned against an ‘entrepreneurial’ mana-
gerial style that ignores or runs roughshod over the fundamental
public service character of public administration. And given his incli-
nation to link theory to practice, he has been a leading figure in articu-

Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library

Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
18 Peter Aucoin

lating the public service values and ethics that define what the public
service character of public administration should mean in practice.

Before the New Public Management

More than four decades ago, in the early 1960s, just before Ken Ker-
naghan began his professorial career, the Canadian Royal Commission
on Government Organization – the Glassco Commission – delivered a
report that proposed a major reform agenda for public administration
predicated on this fundamental prescription: ‘Let the managers man-
age.’ The private sector’s influence in this prescription was obvious. In
the private sector there are boards of directors and managers, each with
different roles and responsibilities. The realm of management belongs
to the latter. The Glassco Commission recognized that the public and
private sectors are different; but when it came to management in the
public service, it wanted the public sector to emulate the private sector
as much as possible. Recall that by the 1960s, ‘management’ in the pri-
vate sector had fully come into its own. The modern corporation, with
its division of roles and responsibilities between a board of directors
and managers, had become the dominant organizational form of pri-
vate sector business. The MBA was the new academic credential for
management in the modern corporation (notwithstanding the retention
of the term ‘administration’ in the degree’s title). And management
consulting firms, as well as the accounting profession, were entering a
new era of prosperity with increased status and influence as well as
increased revenues.
The Glassco Commission had a strong impact on Canadian public
administration, and a good deal of administrative deregulation and
decentralization followed. Numerous modern management techniques
were introduced by the central corporate-management agencies of gov-
ernment, especially by the newly established Treasury Board Secretar-
iat (itself the creation of the Glassco Commission) and the greatly
expanded (albeit independent) Public Service Commission. Many if not
most of these techniques were drawn from private sector management
experience. Similar developments occurred in the United States.
Indeed, Canada and the United States moved to the forefront of public
administration reforms internationally.
At the same time, the managerial prescriptions of the Glassco Com-
mission did not always fit well with the Westminster system of public

Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library

Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 19

administration, characterized as it was by collective cabinet executive

authority, responsibility, and accountability for the whole of govern-
ment, on the one hand, and by individual ministerial authority, respon-
sibility, and accountability for the separate departments of government,
on the other. Public servants – even deputy ministers as the administra-
tive heads of departments – had no recognized status separate from that
of their political masters. There was no acceptance of a politics/admin-
istration dichotomy, as had long been a feature of American public
administration. Furthermore, the government had a collective interest
in applying standardized management rules, processes, and procedures
across the entire government. For their part, ministers relied on these
government-wide standards of management, established and policed
by central corporate-management agencies, to ensure that their depart-
mental public servants complied with established management prac-
tices and to relieve ministers of the need to pay ongoing attention to
management issues.
Within this management context, even senior public administrators
had not been called on to exercise much discretion (if any) in managing
their financial and human resources, in leading their staff, or in deliver-
ing public services. While it cannot be said that the government
operated on automatic pilot, the government-wide and standardized
system of rules, processes, and procedures meant that managers were
first and foremost administrators of ‘systems.’ As Hodgetts expressed
it, deputy ministers had responsibilities without authority.5 Most of
these systems were designed at the centre of government and were
meant to control for maladministration by departmental officials as
much as they were meant to advance good management. Hence the
notion of a ‘command and control’ structure and culture.
The growth and complexity of Western government bureaucracies
after the Second World War had, paradoxically, both stimulated interest
in government-wide standards to constrain public servants’ discretion
and diminished the likelihood that these standards would secure econ-
omy and efficiency. The drawback to a highly centralized and tightly
controlled system – even assuming that it could reduce the incidence of
maladministration and corrupt behaviour – was that it prevented man-
agers from making the most economical and efficient use of resources.
This was because it restricted the authority, and thus reduced the range
of options, for managers to take decisions that could achieve economies
and efficiencies in their particular operational settings. It also relieved

Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library

Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
20 Peter Aucoin

managers of responsibility and accountability for managing in ways

that pursued economy and efficiency. In short, it impoverished the the-
ory and practice of management in the public service.

Emergence of the New Public Management

It is important to remember that NPM arose in the 1960s and 1970s, a

time when postwar ambitions coincided with postwar affluence and
when the Westminster model of impoverished management (as des-
cribed above) confronted an expanding number and range of public
services as state intervention in the socio-economic order increased sig-
nificantly. The result was an increasing number of diversified public
services, provided by an ever expanding public service bureaucracy
and accompanied by growing annual government deficits and mount-
ing national debt. By the late 1970s something had to give, and it did,
with the election of several governments intent on ‘rolling back the
state.’ Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in Britain led the
way.6 Rolling back the state meant

1 privatizing state enterprises,

2 contracting out to the private sector the task of delivering those pub-
lic services that had not been privatized,
3 eliminating some public services, and
4 reducing government spending (or at least slowing down the rate of
its growth) through greater economies and efficiencies.

Privatization and contracting out were justified on two grounds:

first, it would reduce budgetary requirements; and second, it would
improve national economic productivity. Privatization transformed
what had been public services provided by state bureaucracies into pri-
vate services under private ownership and provided in the market-
place. Contracting out placed public services under private sector
management.
Privatizations, of course, were one-off exercises. Once privatized, a
service was no longer a public service.7 Contracting out, on the other
hand, did more than bring the private sector into public service delivery.
It also introduced the idea that the ‘market’ – that is, competition
between competing potential providers (public sector and/or private
sector providers) over contracts to deliver public services – would
secure greater economy and efficiency in the management of these ser-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 21

vices as opposed to having them provided by the public service as a

monopoly provider. In Britain this idea constituted the foundation of a
policy that went beyond the case of contracting out to the private sector
whenever it was clear that increased efficiencies could be obtained. This
new policy regime imposed ‘compulsory market testing’ that required
public service managers to subject some portion of their services to mar-
ket competition on an annual basis. At the same time, in the spirit of
open competition, the government allowed its public service units that
had formerly provided these services to compete against potential pri-
vate sector providers for the contracts under tender.8 This approach
acknowledges that competition between potential providers is what
spurs improvements in economy and efficiency; it is not the public or
private status of the providers. So long as the public service provider
does not have monopoly control over a service, and thus must compete
periodically against private sector providers to maintain a ‘contract,’ it
should have every incentive to achieve all possible economies and effi-
ciencies. In this respect, it is no different from a private sector provider;
its vested interest is in winning contracts to stay in business.
It did not take long, though, for public management reformers to
realize that there would still be a lot left to manage once the bulk of
privatization was accomplished and the contracting-out policy was in
full effect.9 NPM, in other words, also had to involve improving the
management of those services which the public service would continue
to provide directly – that is, those not privatized or contracted out.
The British approach to reform initially stressed achieving greater
economies and efficiencies by conducting wide-ranging ‘efficiency
scrutinies’ to search out those areas where efficiencies could be
achieved and then by taking the necessary decisions to realize them.
This was coupled with some streamlining of central corporate-manage-
ment regulations and some decentralization of financial and human
resources administrative authorities. By the end of the first decade of
reform the British had also adopted a more contractual approach to
public management by separating ministerial departments from what
came to be called ‘executive agencies.’ The former retained responsibil-
ities for setting policy and monitoring its implementation; the latter
were given responsibilities for policy implementation through the
delivery of public services. These executive agencies had at one time
been the divisions or branches of ministerial departments that man-
aged and delivered public services. This decoupling of ‘policy’ from
‘operations’ (often referred to as the ‘Next Steps’ program, because it
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
22 Peter Aucoin

followed on from the initial efforts to improve performance simply by

devolving management authority), allowed for a full-blown, contractu-
ally based performance management structure and regime.
In New Zealand the major theoretical influence on reformers was
agency theory. This resulted in a restructuring of the relationship
between ministers and their chief executives so that it was grounded
on a contractual basis, rather than merely a hierarchical basis. The
aim was to make it much clearer what the ministers expected of their
chief executives. Performance measures were established to ensure that
these executives were subject to rigorous evaluation of their perfor-
mance in meeting ministers’ expectations. Also, a vigorous manage-
ment accountability regime was put in place to keep chief executives on
track and in check by their ministers. But there was more to agency the-
ory: chief executives were now regarded as professional managers, and
as such they were expected to act as the professional ‘agents’ of their
ministers, who were their ‘principals.’ In this context, the managers
had the authority, discretion, and flexibility to deploy and manage the
resources that were provided to them by their ministers for the produc-
tion (‘output’) of public services in the most economical and efficient
manner. Ministers, in other words, would not intervene in manage-
ment; that would be the realm of professional managers as agents under
contract. Performance awards provided managers with incentives to be
economical and efficient in their use of resources, including financial
and human resources. In addition, New Zealand redesigned its depart-
mental structures so that some advised ministers on policy while others
delivered the services that ministers wanted delivered. The British ter-
minology of ‘executive agencies’ was not used; but the organizational
design was similar.10
Australia was an interesting case of NPM reform because it did not
accept the policy/operations dichotomy as the basis for organizing
governance and public management, as occurred in Britain and New
Zealand, even though it was willing to use it in limited circumstances
when there was little need for ongoing policy direction from ministers
and their senior advisers. Moreover, a major reorganization of ministe-
rial portfolios in 1987 streamlined the number of ministerial depart-
ments and made the capacity for ministerial direction even more
important in the context of reform. At the same time, the government
was willing to devolve management authority to senior departmental
managers, in part by substantially deregulating administrative controls
and redesigning the central corporate-management agencies, espe-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 23

cially those involved in human resources. Finally, the Australian

approach was interesting because the government succeeded in achiev-
ing its budgetary objectives, ending deficits, and substantially reducing
its debt.11
Equally important, however, was that the Australian government,
throughout this first decade of reform, did not lose sight of the require-
ment that the government achieve its agenda of intended policy ‘out-
comes.’ In its view, managing ‘inputs’ (especially money and people) to
produce ‘outputs’ (services, programs, operations) as economically
and efficiently as possible was important. But so, too, was achieving
effective outcomes – in other words, outputs had to have the intended
effect or impact so that the desired changes in the socio-economic order
actually occurred. This meant managing to outcomes. It also meant that
policy design was critical: no matter how good the management of
programs, if the policy design was faulty then the intended effects
would not be realized. Australian reformers regarded themselves as
having an approach to public management reform different from that
of the British and New Zealanders, whom they saw as focused first and
foremost on economy and efficiency, with too little attention paid to
effectiveness.
In Canada the emergence of NPM was slow and cautious.12 There
was precious little ministerial interest until the Conservatives came to
power in 1984 with a campaign platform that promised many things,
including public management reform. The Mulroney government
sought to emulate both Reagan and Thatcher in rolling back the state by
way of a major ‘program review,’ headed by the deputy prime minister
and assisted by teams with equal numbers of public servants and pri-
vate sector managers. The result was supposed to be a major streamlin-
ing of government services and operations. This effort was a failure (as
was the American effort), in contrast to the more realistic and more pro-
fessional (and, ironically, more public service) conduct of efficiency
scrutinies in Britain. The consequence in Canada was a decade of suc-
cessive rounds of what were essentially across-the-board percentage
cuts to government administrative budgets, but no major program re-
ductions.
There was a modest effort at streamlining management regulations
and delegating authority to departmental managers, but no significant
restructuring to produce anything like the policy/operations organiza-
tional separations found in Britain and New Zealand. A handful of
‘special operating agencies’ were established, but these paled in com-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
24 Peter Aucoin

parison to the British and New Zealand organizational designs. They

employed less than 5 per cent of the public service; equally important,
they were subordinate to the deputy ministers of their ‘parent’ depart-
ments instead of having direct contractual relationships with ministers.
Their administrative authority made them ‘special’ in comparison to
departments, but these were modest delegations of power compared
to what was happening elsewhere. As in Australia, the integrated
policy and implementation ministerial department remained the
norm.
In 1989, however, the federal public service, with the backing but not
the enthusiastic interest of ministers, unveiled a Public Service 2000
reform program that, at least in its rhetoric and scope, sought to match
developments elsewhere. It was not a success. As a public service–led
reform, this program could not and did not achieve a sufficient degree
of coherence. It tried to maintain traditions while promoting reforms,
some of which contradicted one another. The result could not be other
than a good deal of inconsistency between rhetoric and reality as well
as a tendency for the various reform components to ride off in different
directions.
By the mid-1990s, however, NPM had begun to give ground to
reforms or initiatives that were not inspired primarily, or at all, by the
theoretical or ideological underpinnings of NPM. In Australia the new
conservative government aggressively pursued an NPM agenda of
competition and contracting; in Britain the New Labour government
did not give up on performance measurement and competition, but
neither did it add anything new to the NPM paradigm. At the same
time, several initiatives that drew inspiration from traditional public
service ideals – or at least a mix of the new and traditional – began to
make their mark in the late 1990s and into the first decade of the
twenty-first century. For instance, efficient management gave ground
as a priority to better service delivery, with the focus on ‘citizen centred’
as opposed to ‘customer centred’ service delivery. For its part, perfor-
mance management turned away from a focus on management perfor-
mance for economy and efficiency towards the effective achievement of
the results or outcomes of government policies, programs, and services.
And the managerial pursuit of producing an organization’s contracted
outputs gave way to the ideal of interorganizational (horizontal, joined
up, or whole of government) collaboration in the pursuit of integrated
or shared objectives. These three general initiatives – citizen-centred
service delivery, results-based management, and horizontal collabora-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 25

tion – emerged in a period of significant public management reform.

These initiatives did not contradict NPM reforms; indeed, in several
respects they assumed that public service managers had sufficient
authority to realize these new initiatives.

New Public Governance: Tensions with New Public Management

NPM encompassed an understanding that the relations between minis-

ters and their public servants needed to be altered. Economies had to be
achieved in order to reduce budgetary outlays, and ministers had to
ensure that they controlled any budget-maximizing behaviour on the
part of their bureaucrats. Ministers had to insist on better public service
management in order to achieve efficiencies as a second means to
reduce costs. What they wanted from NPM was improved manage-
ment of resources and better delivery of public services.
At the same time, political leaders such as Thatcher, Reagan, and
Mulroney were not the least bit enamoured by what they perceived to
be their self-serving bureaucracies.13 They had to ensure that they were
not captured by their bureaucrats’ policy preferences. Thus they had to
end the bureaucracy’s monopoly position in giving advice to ministers
by bringing in political staff as alternative or competing sources of
advice. In public choice theory, these political leaders found an academ-
ically respectable and increasingly popular theoretical justification for
their position in addition to useful rhetoric with which to bash their
bureaucracies.14 The theory provided the rationale for extensive politi-
cal interventions in the staffing of their respective senior public services
well beyond what these two systems had previously experienced, even
in the American case.15
In Australia, political interventions increased as well. The approach
was influenced by the American experience, though the new Labor
government in 1983, which was originally expected to politicize the
upper echelons of the public service in the American style, on the
assumption of office decided instead to significantly expand the num-
ber and roles of political staff (also an American influence). It did so in
part because it was able to appoint a host of former public servants to
political staff positions. Ministers continued to head departments.
However, they were now advised not only by their departmental pub-
lic servants but also by their political staff. This introduced a new
dynamic of competition between policy advisers. As managed by suc-
cessive Labor governments, nonetheless, this new style worked excep-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
26 Peter Aucoin

tionally well, in large part because ministers engaged their public

servants instead of overriding them.16 This style ended with the elec-
tion of John Howard’s Liberal-National government in 1996, when the
new government decided to rely primarily on its political advisers and
to appoint politically friendly public servants to senior posts in the
public service.17
In New Zealand, a new regime for staffing the senior cadre of the
public service was adopted in order to give ministers a greater say in
the appointment and management of their ‘chief executives’ (as the
former permanent heads of departments were now to be called). Given
what ministers and reformers were hoping to accomplish in New
Zealand by restructuring minister–chief executive relationships, the
reformed regime for staffing the chief executive cadre turned out to be
the most independent among the four Westminster systems.18 Chief
executives are appointed by Cabinet on the recommendation of the
State Services Commissioner following an open competition for vacant
positions. The Cabinet can reject a recommendation but must disclose
any appointment that it makes without a recommendation from the
commissioner. Not surprisingly, this has not happened. Indeed, only
one recommendation has ever been rejected (which required another
recommended candidate), and that was early on after the adoption of
the process. Though the commissioner consults with ministers before
competitions are held, ministers – including the prime minister – have
little room to intervene in favour of particular candidates relative to the
other Westminster systems. As a consequence, there has been less
bureaucracy bashing in New Zealand than in the other Anglo-Ameri-
can systems now that the new chief executive staffing regime has been
fully implemented.19
In Canada, Brian Mulroney, while on the election campaign trail in
1984, had issued a clear warning to deputy ministers that bureaucratic
intransigence and obstruction would not be tolerated under a Conser-
vative government.20 His party had expressed interest (the same inter-
est as had been expressed a year earlier in Australia) in the American
style of political appointments to the upper echelons of the public ser-
vice. As in Australia, however, the Mulroney Conservatives, once in
office, opted to increase the number and strengthen the role of political
staff in the prime minister’s and ministers’ offices.
In each of these cases, developments were emerging that could not
but introduce tensions with NPM. These developments constituted
what I will call the New Public Governance (NPG). This new dynamic
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 27

is clearly the political element of governance, an element that cannot

but affect public management reform as an integral part of governance.
(Together, NPM and NPG might even be viewed as parts of a dialectic
process, with NPM the thesis and NPG the antithesis but with the syn-
thesis not yet clear.) NPG entails the following:

• The concentration of power under the prime minister and his or her
‘court’ of a few select ministers, political aides, and public servants.
• An increased number of political staff, and their enhanced roles and
influence.
• Increased personal attention by the prime minister to the appoint-
ment of senior public servants (where the prime minister has the
power to appoint).
• Increased pressure on the public service to provide a pro-govern-
ment spin on government communications.
• The increased expectation that public servants will demonstrate
enthusiasm for the government’s agenda beyond the traditional
requirement of loyal implementation of the government’s program.

Under NPG, political leaders seek to reassert their democratic right

to govern by taking control of the state apparatus.21 The structures of
government everywhere are thus subject to pressures that serve to con-
centrate power at the centre.22
The resulting pressures on government are myriad. At times of
breaking news, political leaders find themselves having to attend to the
politics of governance with virtually no time for contemplation. A rev-
olution in communications has made government information widely
available. New laws are extending to the citizenry, including the press,
the right to access government information. A new coterie of external
audit and review agencies are keeping government under constant
scrutiny. An increasingly aggressive complex of parliamentary commit-
tees is conducting ongoing examinations of ministers and officials.
Public opinion polls are constantly testing public reactions to govern-
ment policies and leaders. Finally, citizens are less deferential than in
the past and are demanding an accounting from government officials,
be they elected or appointed.
Political systems vary in the extent to which power is concentrated,
in part because of the effectiveness of formal and informal institutional
arrangements that are meant to serve as checks on executive power, in
part because of the capacity of political executives to assert control over
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
28 Peter Aucoin

their political colleagues as well as their public services. It is now suffi-

ciently clear, however, that this phenomenon is not limited to particular
individuals or even political systems: the pressures are universal and
so, too, has been the increased concentration of power. Canada’s expe-
rience has placed it at the forefront of the concentration of power, given
the relative weakness of the checks and balances to prime ministerial
power.23
All of this pressures governments to be more strategic in what they
do and especially in what they say as well as the way they say it. Mod-
ern government communications, accordingly, have become perhaps
the driving force behind the concentration of power, as the political
leadership seeks to manage a constantly turbulent political environ-
ment, especially in relation to the mass media, which have vested
interests in political turbulence. The growing numbers of political staff
in virtually all governments cannot but exacerbate the situation, now
that political popularity, as measured in the polls and by the media, is
becoming the sole standard of good government. Internationally, the
best-known illustration here was the tussle between Tony Blair’s press
secretary, Alastair Campbell, and the British public service’s communi-
cations staff over Campbell’s insistence that public servants be enthusi-
astic in communicating the government’s agenda with the desired
‘spin’ – a tussle complicated after Blair gave Campbell, a political staff
appointee and not a public servant, the unprecedented power to give
orders to public servants.24 A not dissimilar illustration was evident in
a political debacle in Australia, when ministers and political staff pres-
sured the public service to spin a story in a particular way.25
In the Canadian context, a number of recent debacles have provided
more than sufficient evidence that NPG is a dominant feature of the
Canadian regime. Canada’s public service has become too subservient
to the government of the day in various ways – some of these com-
pletely inappropriate, as in the sponsorship scandal. Clearly, that scan-
dal was an extreme case. But it is not an isolated exception. There has
been virtually no opposition to or criticism of Savoie’s thesis that the
‘bargain’ between ministers and public servants – a bargain that once
governed relations between ministers and public servants – has been
broken.26 As one of Canada’s most respected former deputy ministers,
Arthur Kroeger, put it, in the sponsorship scandal the public service
‘got their marching orders and they marched.’27 They failed to exercise
their responsibilities when confronted by ministers and their political
staffs: they said ‘Yes, Minister’ when they should have said ‘No, Minis-
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 29

ter,’ and they failed to tell political staff to respect the constitutional sys-
tem. Little evidence has come to light since that they challenged the
Liberal government’s efforts to re-establish a ‘command and control’
structure over public administration.
Even more to the point, the Conservative government of Stephen
Harper, elected in 2006 entirely as a consequence of the fallout from the
sponsorship scandal, has governed as though NPG’s script was written
expressly for it. The prime minister has taken complete command of the
government by governing from the centre – that is, from his own office
rather than with the Cabinet – and with the strictest definition of party
discipline for his party caucus. He has given primacy to the strategic
advice of his political staff. He has appointed a new deputy minister to
himself and expects him, as head of the non-partisan, professional pub-
lic service, to direct the public service in ways that conform to the prime
minister’s preferences. And, more generally, he expects the public
service to enthusiastically advance the agenda of his government (por-
trayed as ‘Canada’s New Government’). Finally, he has ignored the
principal findings and recommendations of the Gomery Commission28
on the very scandal that brought him to power – namely, the fundamen-
tal requirements (1) to constrain the power of the prime minister, (2) to
limit the roles of political staff, (3) to secure the independence of the pro-
fessional public service, and (4) to enhance the powers of Parliament
vis-à-vis the prime minister and government.

Striking the Balance: Empowerment in Public Administration

NPM is not going to disappear any time soon, even if this term for pub-
lic management reform becomes less frequently used or even disap-
pears from the lexicon. Indeed, in some critical respects NPM no longer
exists as a reform movement; it has become the status quo. Everywhere
it is now recognized that improved public management requires a nec-
essary degree of management capacity and that management capacity
begins with the authority to manage. There are no major calls to return
to past ways.
Empowerment – as devolution, delegation, and decentralization –
was the major contribution of NPM to contemporary public adminis-
tration. NPM sought to empower public service administrators so that
they could better manage public money, public service staff, and the
delivery of public services. In each of these respects, Ken Kernaghan’s
scholarly fingerprints are everywhere.
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
30 Peter Aucoin

Empowerment, as he deployed the concept,29 is an essential condition

for improved management. It is necessary because managers need
authority in order to use resources economically and efficiently, engage
their subordinate managers and staff so that they pursue organizational
missions, and coach and train them so that they can achieve desired
results. And increasingly, they need authority in order to partner effec-
tively with those who manage other organizations so as to realize those
organizational objectives that cannot be achieved without the collabo-
ration of others.30 Empowerment, in this sense, encompasses the struc-
tural or organizational dimensions that provide the authority for
managers to act as managers. This is the case even where there is a hier-
archy of managers – the norm in all complex organizations, however
much senior managers attempt to develop management teams and
thereby ‘flatten’ their hierarchies. But empowerment, as he emphasizes,
is more. It is more precisely because it acknowledges that improved
management demands that power be shared with others in order to get
things done well. Hierarchy may be necessary for certain purposes,
such as accountability; but for other critical dimensions of management,
including achieving results, hierarchy must give way to power sharing,
both vertical and horizontal.
Ken Kernaghan is at his best in thinking through what empowerment
means because he has always considered public management reform in
the context of the intellectual traditions and practical experiences of
Canadian and Anglo-American public administration. Empowerment
in public administration may be a movement that came and went as a
management fad, but as a concept in his analysis it represents the fun-
damental challenge of striking a balance between NPM and NPG. He
sees that balance not simply as between ‘letting the managers manage’
and ‘making the managers manage,’ but as between ‘letting the manag-
ers manage’ and ‘making the managers manage’ according to the consti-
tutional, democratic, and professional values and ethics of the public service.
Letting the managers manage in the public service means allowing
them to exercise discretion as to how best to use resources, serve citi-
zens, engage staff, delegate, motivate, and partner. It is not simply let-
ting managers down the line do whatever they want – to ignore, let
alone discard, the constitutional, democratic, and professional values
and ethics of the public service. Rather, it is to insist that empowered
managers in an empowered public service maintain the highest stan-
dards of a professional public service but do so in ways that require
them to exercise professional judgment on how these values and ethics
apply to a wide range ofBrought
matters – as opposed to simply following pre-
to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 31

scribed rules – and then provide an account.31 Rules will not disappear
altogether, for precision is required on some matters. But an extensive
elaboration of rules cannot but diminish management authority and
hence disempower managers. Writing more than a decade ago, Ken
Kernaghan was clear on the need to keep managers in check so that the
norms of public administration would prevail. He was equally clear
that ‘more attention must be paid to those elements of political neutral-
ity that can be preserved or reinforced.’ He was prescient in seeing the
tensions that would arise as NPM and NPG clashed. He argued that
‘this will require not only limitations on politically partisan activity and
public comment by public servants below the senior levels of govern-
ment; it will also require careful management of the line between polit-
ical partisanship and political sensitivity and the avoidance of
patronage appointments at the senior levels.’32
His prescription stands: the Canadian federal public service in 2008
needs to pay greater attention to measures that will secure a neutral
public service, reduce partisan political pressures on public servants,
and strengthen the independence of the senior public service. His schol-
arship has served us faithfully and well.

NOTES

1 Peter Aucoin, The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective

(Montreal: IRPP, 1995).
2 Kenneth Kernaghan, Brian Marson, and Sandford Borins, The New Public
Organization (Toronto: IPAC, 2000).
3 Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouchaert (2004) argue that an alternative
‘Neo-Weberian State’ model has emerged in the continental European
states, although, as they construct it, it is an alternative essentially to the
extreme marketization version of NPM. This alternative might be viewed
as NPM infused with public service values and ethics!
4 Donald Kettl, The Global Public Management Revolution, 2nd ed. (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2005).
5 J.E. Hodgetts, The Canadian Public Service (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1973).
6 Aucoin, The New Public Management.
7 In several cases of privatization in Britain and elsewhere, however, the gov-
ernment then proceeded to create regulatory agencies to provide a measure
of public policy control over these newly privatized enterprises. This was
especially the case where the enterprises were essentially public utilities.
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
32 Peter Aucoin

For many European governments, independent regulatory agencies were a

new development. In Canada and the United States, there had long been a
tradition of using independent regulatory agencies for these purposes. In
Canada they were used even to regulate state enterprises, such as Air Can-
ada and the Canadian National Railway Company.
8 There were a few strategic areas where it wanted the private sector to pro-
vide public services, which were exempted from this policy.
9 This was particularly the case in Britain as public service providers quickly
became fully competitive with the private sector and began to win a major-
ity of the contracts subject to market testing.
10 Christopher Pollitt, Colin Talbot, Janice Caufield, and Amanda Smullen,
Agencies: How Governments Do Things through Semi-Autonomous Organiza-
tions (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
11 Various neoliberal economic policies may have contributed as much if not
more to the budgetary success of the government, but the management
reforms were generally given credit as well.
12 Kernaghan, ‘Career Public Service 2000: Road to Renewal or Impractical
Vision?’ Canadian Public Administration 34, no. 4 (1991): 551–72.
13 Donald Savoie, Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureau-
cracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
14 Sandford Borins, ‘Public Choice: “Yes, Minister” Made It Popular, but Does
Winning the Nobel Prize Make It True?’ Canadian Public Administration 31
(1988): 12–26.
15 Colin Campbell and Graham Wilson, The End of Whitehall: The Death of a
Paradigm? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995).
16 Campbell, ‘Judging Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes in the Search for Policy
Competence: Recent Experience in Australia,’ Governance 14, no. 2 (2001):
253–82.
17 John Halligan, ‘The Australian Public Service: Redefining Boundaries,’ in
Halligan, ed., Civil Service Systems in Anglo-American Countries (Chelten-
ham: Edward Elgar, 2004), 70–111; Patrick Weller, Australia’s Mandarins: The
Frank and the Fearless? (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2001).
18 Jonathan Boston, John Martin, June Pallot, and Pat Walsh, Public Manage-
ment: The New Zealand Model (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1996);
idem, eds., Reshaping the State: New Zealand’s Bureaucratic Revolution (Auck-
land: Oxford University Press, 1991).
19 Richard Norman, Obedient Servants? Management Freedoms and Accountabili-
ties in the New Zealand Public Sector (Wellington: Victoria University Press,
2003).
20 Savoie, Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney.
Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library
Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM
 New Public Management and New Public Governance 33

21 Evert Lindquist, ed., Government Restructuring and Career Public Services

(Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 2000).
22 Savoie, Governing from the Centre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999); Campbell, ‘Judging Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes’; Graham Wil-
son and Anthony Barker, ‘Bureaucrats and Politicians in Britain,’ Gover-
nance 16, no. 3 (2003): 349–72.
23 Peter Aucoin, Jennifer Smith, and Geoff Dinsdale, Responsible Government
(Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 2004). There are
significant checks in the Canadian political system, including the federal
distribution of power as well as the court-enforced Charter of Rights and
Freedoms. But within the executive and legislative structures, the powers
of the Canadian prime minister are subject to no significant checks and bal-
ances when the governing party is a majority in the House.
24 Wilson and Barker, ‘Bureaucrats and Politicians in Britain.’
25 Patrick Weller, Don’t Tell the Prime Minister (Melbourne: Scribe, 2002).
26 Savoie, Breaking the Bargain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
27 Norma Greenway, ‘They Got Their Marching Orders and They Marched,’
Ottawa Citizen, 12 February 2004.
28 Canada, Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Adver-
tising Activities, Restoring Accountability: Recommendations (Ottawa, 2006).
29 Kernaghan, ‘Empowerment and Public Administration: Revolutionary
Advance or Passing Fad?’ Canadian Public Administration 35, no. 2 (1992):
194–214.
30 Kernaghan, ‘Partnership and Public Administration: Conceptual and Prac-
tical Considerations,’ Canadian Public Administration 36, no. 1 (1993): 57–76.
31 Kernaghan, ‘The Emerging Public Service Culture: Values, Ethics, and
Reforms,’ Canadian Public Administration 37, no. 4 (1994): 614, 631; Ker-
naghan, ‘Towards a Public Service Code of Conduct – and Beyond,’ Cana-
dian Public Administration 40, no. 1 (1997): 40–54.
32 Kernaghan, ‘Empowerment and Public Administration,’ 214.

Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library

Authenticated
Download Date | 12/10/19 9:35 AM