New public management

Approach to running public services New public management (NPM) is an approach to the administration of public service organizations that is employed in government and public service institutions and agencies at both the sub-national and national levels. The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia 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. As with the private sector, which focuses on customer service and maximizing shareholder wealth, NPM reforms often focused on the "centrality of citizens who were the recipients of the services or customers to the public sector". NPM reformers experimented with using decentralized service delivery models, to give local agencies more freedom in how they delivered programmes or services. In some cases, NPM reforms that used e-government consolidated a programme or service to a central location to reduce costs. Some governments tried using quasi-market structures, so that the public sector would have to compete against the private sector (notably in the UK, in health care