ORIGIN, IDEAS AND PRACTICE OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: LESSONS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Abstract

T PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO EXAMINE WHETHER NEW Public Management (NPM) ideas should be adopted in developing countries. However, before we do that, it may be necessary to review the background and current status of NPM in the developed world. What is the content of the set of ideas that has been labelled NPM, and what are the experiences from the countries where they have been put into practice. The introduction of NPM ideas in the developing countries may be seen as an example of policy transfer or lesson drawing, where the government of one country tries to learn from the experiences of another country. As Richard Rose (1993) has pointed out – policy learning is not a new phenomenon. For instance, when Japan in the nineteenth century was forced by the imperialist powers to break out of its isolation from the rest of the world, it decided to do it vigorously and copied wildly from the United States of America and the European countries: how to organize the military, the education systems, the postal services etc. After the Second World War, the Japanese imitated extensively from the USA in particular. When the founding fathers of the Norwegian Constitution met at Eidsvoll in 1814 they also picked ideas from other places, including the American Constitution and French Revolution.

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