Factors Guiding Public Management Reform

Common Pressures

• Globalization-global pressures to cooperate and compete in new ways;
• Dissatisfaction-ever rising expectation of citizens; and
• Budget stringency-the need to reduce deficits.

• Decentralization of authority within governmental units and devolution of responsibilities to lower levels of government (for example, municipalities);
• A reexamination of what government should both do and pay for, what it should pay for but not do, what it should neither do nor pay for;
• Downsizing the public service and the privatization and corporatization of activities;
• Consideration of more cost-effective ways of delivering services, such as contracting out, market mechanisms, and user charges;
• Customer orientation, including quality standards for public services;
• Benchmarking and measuring performance; and
• Reforms designed to simplify regulation and reduce its costs.

• The tension between decentralizing and delegating service delivery (with its greater acceptance of risk-taking) and pressures for accountability to the taxpayer;
• A similar tension between the desirability for flexibility and experimentation on the one hand and the problem of avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes;
• The advantages of consultation and consensus development versus the danger of becoming captive to narrow interest groups and the necessity for rapid decision-making often forced by external economic events;
• The potential of media as a means of communicating with the pubic versus the threat of media as an undue policy influence;
• The need to serve citizens as customers on the one hand, while not neglecting the disadvantaged or vulnerable who may not be able to speak up as customers;
• Increasing local responsibility (devolution) while compensating for unequal local resources;
• Balancing the advantages of information technology in terms of service delivery and the availability of public information versus citizen privacy and unrealistic expectation for governmental response; and
• Conflict between deficit reduction in the name of future growth and the need for public investment in human capital, infrastructure and research and development.