The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia[1][full citation needed] to describe approaches that were developed during the 1980s as part of an effort to make the public service more "businesslike" and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.
[2] Key themes in NPM were "financial control, value for money, increasing efficiency ..., identifying and setting targets and continuance monitoring of performance, handing over ... power to the senior management" executives.
[2] NPM advocates in some countries worked to remove "collective agreements [in favour of] ... individual rewards packages at senior levels combined with short term contracts" and introduce private sector-style corporate governance, including using a board of directors approach to strategic guidance for public organizations.
[5] The first practices of new public management emerged in the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher's successor, John Major, kept public management policy on the agenda of the Conservative government, leading to the implementation of the Next Steps Initiative.
A term was coined in the late 1980s to denote a new (or renewed) focus on the importance of management and 'production engineering' in public service delivery, which often linked to doctrines of economic rationalism (Hood 1989, Pollitt 1993).
During this timeframe public management became an active area of policy-making in numerous other countries, notably in New Zealand,[6] Australia, and Sweden.
Early policy actions of the Clinton administration included launching the National Partnership and signing into law the Government Performance and Results Act.
[7] The term new public management (NPM) expresses the idea that the cumulative flow of policy decisions over the past twenty years has amounted to a substantial shift in the governance and management of the "state sector" in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Scandinavia, North America, and Latin America.
[9] These reforms, which were triggered and motivated by a variety of factors and resulted in the development of various models, led to the emergence of a global NPM trend.
[10] Despite the global nature of the movement,[11] the concepts and models of the reform were diverse and developed in accordance with each country's specific and unique context and in response to the distinct challenge that it was facing.
Therefore, in spite of the common features of the reforms, their driving factors, objectives, extent, and areas of focus varied across countries.
[9] Moreover, although the NPM reforms of Switzerland were influenced by the Netherlands' Tilburg model, their main motivator was dissatisfaction with the old public management system and its deficiencies.
[13] For developing nations and former communist countries, the motivation for reforms was benefiting from participation in a globalized economy and fulfilling the requirements of international donors.
[9] In South Africa and Zambia, for instance, independent authorities were created for tax collection with the primary goal of promoting accountability.
[9] In France, the 1982 Act of Decentralization, which created autonomous local collectivities in the areas of budgeting and taxation, led to managerialism and privatization.
[10] For instance, OECD played a vital role in facilitating the transfer of reforms across its member countries by developing tools and guidelines.
NPM was cited as the solution for management ills in various organizational context and policy making in education and health care reform.
This characteristic centers on how NPM can advance competition within the public sector which may in turn lower fetched, dispose of debate and conceivably accomplish a better quality of progress/work through the term contracts.
It moreover centers on setting up a working environment in which open representatives or temporary workers are mindful of the objectives and intention that offices are attempting to reach.
Questions have been raised about the potential politicization of the public service, when executives are hired on contract under pay-for-performance systems.
[21][22] NPM brings to question integrity and compliance when dealing with incentives for public managers – the interests of customers and owners do not always align.
Digital era governance provides a unique opportunity for self-sustainability; however, there are various factors that will determine whether or not DEG can be implemented successfully.
In Employing Recent Technologies for Improved Digital Governance" works to provide the theoretical and practical basis to substantiate the claim.