The manifold meanings of ‘post-New Public Management’ – a systematic literature review

Abstract

For more than 30 years, New Public Management has been the most popular label for public sector reform. For more than 15 years, however, New Public Management has also been heavily criticized. There is a growing trend to consider New Public Management as ‘dead’ and claim the evolution of a new reform trend, called post-New Public Management. Like New Public Management, post-New Public Management is an umbrella term that is used to prescribe and/or describe different reform trends. The aim of this article is to give a state of the art of recent post-New Public Management literature by discerning the manifold meanings of this label. For this purpose, a systematic review of 84 articles published in peer-reviewed high-quality journals has been conducted. The article shows that, so far, the post-New Public Management idea has been very influential as an ‘ideational weapon’ to indicate a crisis of the New Public Management model. The use of the post-New Public Management idea as a blueprint for future reform, however, still needs further treatment.

Points for practitioners

Since the 1980s, New Public Management has served as a toolbox for the reform of public administrations all over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and beyond. In the course of its ‘pick and choose’ application, New Public Management has become an object of manifold criticism. In order to overcome the New Public Management ‘leftovers’, reformers of public management have reintroduced old concepts or invented new reform tools since the late 1990s. Systematically reviewing both theoretical and empirical academic works on this ‘post-New Public Management’ movement, we – inter alia – shed light on the question of whether ‘post-New Public Management’ can be considered a (new) model for practitioners of public management reform.