Loose Threads: Beyond The New Public Management Obsession

12/11/2025

Public administration scholarship about Aotearoa appears to have trapped itself in an analytical loop, endlessly diagnosing what New Public Management did and how successive reforms have tried to fix it. This obsession creates two problematic myopias that allow scholars to sidestep the constitutional questions that should anchor any serious analysis of how the state operates here. Today’s loose threads post covers how public administration might be stuck in an NPM loop, what we broke and how to fix it, while the real story is Aotearoa’s 185-year tussle over where authority sits. Heads up though: polemical language and tone ahead.

I am in the final stages of redrafting the literature review chapter of my PhD. This means I have spent the past several months systematically reading through decades of scholarship on public administration and public policy about Aotearoa.

When you do this kind of comprehensive review, by which I mean reading not just the canonical texts but also the responses, counter-arguments, refinements, and attempts at synthesis, patterns become visible that might otherwise remain submerged.

One pattern has become impossible to ignore. Public administration scholarship about Aotearoa has a very peculiar fixation. It diagnoses what New Public Management (NPM) did in the 1980s. It analyses the reforms that tried to fix it. It tracks the problems those subsequent reforms created. It proposes new solutions. Then the cycle begins again. Is the literature trapped in an NPM-response loop, endlessly refining our understanding of what went wrong in 1984 and 1988, and the successive waves of reform trying to correct it?

The answer to this question matters because it potentially creates two forms of myopia. Together, they allow scholars to sidestep the constitutional questions that should anchor any serious analysis of how public administration operates in Aotearoa*.

The First Myopia: 1984 as Year Zero

The first problem is temporal. By treating the NPM reforms as the origin story of our current predicament, scholarship implicitly frames administrative history as beginning in 1984. Everything before becomes background, context, the stable baseline against which we measure reform effects.

This framing does useful work for those who would prefer not to centre Te Tiriti in their analysis. The 185-year struggle between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga can be acknowledged in a paragraph, usually somewhere in the introduction or as part of a whakataukī, before we get on with the real business of analysing contractualism, principal-agent theory, and performance frameworks. Te Tiriti and plurality become scenery rather than structure.

But that constitutional contest is not the background. It is the central story. The administrative reforms of the past fourty years are one expression of that enduring struggle, not a departure from it. When we treat NPM as the moment when things went wrong, we obscure the fact that the state’s relationship with Māori communities, for example, has been defined by institutional refusal since the beginning. The machinery of government was built to operate in one language, recognise one form of knowledge, and serve one conception of legitimate authority. That architecture preceded NPM by a century.

The Second Myopia: The Nostalgia Trap

The second problem flows from the first. If NPM is the villain, then the Weberian public service that preceded it becomes, by implication, the proper and correct baseline for some, and a golden era for others. This creates a nostalgia narrative: “We had a functional public service before 1984 and 1988, neo-liberalism and NPM broke it, and now we need to restore what was lost”.

The Weberian public service that scholars invoke with such wistfulness was not a golden age of neutral, let alone objective competence. It was sclerotic, inefficient, and operationally dysfunctional, harming many who encountered it. Tenure often trumped merit. Performance management was almost nonexistent. The system had rules for everything, including regulations on which gear to use when driving up a hill in a Crown vehicle. Acquiring a pen required navigating procurement processes that seemed designed to exhaust rather than enable. Requisitioning a file could take a month. Getting a landline installed could take anywhere from 3 to 12 weeks, depending on where you live. This was not administrative excellence. This was bureaucratic pathology dressed up as proper procedure.

The nostalgia for the pre-NPM system is false. Worse, it is dangerous. Worst of all, it did not simply fail to protect Tīpuna Reo: it actively suppressed it in schools. That suppression was not an unfortunate side effect of neutral bureaucratic rationality. It was policy. The Weberian state knew exactly what it was doing when it punished children for speaking their own language. That was the constitutional work of assimilation, conducted through the machinery of administration.

Sure, the NPM frame allows scholars to critique market logic without confronting the fact that the system they are nostalgic for was designed from the beginning to marginalise some, and not others. The problem is not that we moved away from proper public administration in 1984 and 1998. The problem is that with a few exceptions most scholarship is not assisting officials to build state institutions capable of genuine and enduring partnership with communities on issues that affect them: instead, we leave this mostly up to practioneers, who are dependent on the goodwill of an experienced minister, a tidy policy shop with some good thinkers and writers, and one or two frontline team leaders who are trusted locally.

The Questions Scholars Could Be Asking

When you spend months reading systematically through a field’s scholarship, certain absences become as visible as what is present. Philip Pettit (2022) argues that the state’s core function is to provide a reliable, determinate zone of legal security for its citizens: establishing non-arbitrary rule rather than achieving perfect justice.

What that means is that the state maintains its authority and legitimacy not through perfection but by creating conditions in which power operates through law rather than personal authority, where the rough balance of consent makes arbitrary action difficult and, more importantly, impossible to sustain. This theoretical foundation matters because it establishes the standard against which any state’s legitimacy must be measured.

That standard takes on a particular form in Aotearoa because Te Tiriti o Waitangi established a constitutional relationship between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga: two forms of authority that were meant to coexist, neither subsuming the other.

When the state operates monolingually, recognises only one form of knowledge, and serves one conception of legitimate authority, it fails Pettit’s test (2022). Frankly, the state becomes arbitrary in relation to those whose knowledge it excludes and whose authority it refuses to recognise. Thus, the question of the state’s legitimacy in Aotearoa cannot be answered without addressing how public administration actually operates: through practices that acknowledge both Te Tiriti partners, or through arbitrary authority and capricious decision-making by one partner over the other. This is not abstract constitutional theory. It ought to, and potentially could, help structure how public administration should be studied and understood.

Further, the Te Tiriti relationship manifests in what Matthew Palmer (2007) identifies as the defining feature of our constitutional culture: the battle between authoritarianism and egalitarianism, between concentrated executive power and distributed democratic authority. This battle plays out through endless oscillation between centralisation and decentralisation. How much authority sits at the centre? How much is distributed to regions, cities and communities? Whose knowledge counts in making that determination? Who decides where the boundaries lie?

Every public administrative paradigm we have tried has been shaped by this struggle. This, I hypothesise, is what actually defines administrative practice in Aotearoa, and is deserving of scholarship: not the adoption or rejection of particular NPM-type-and-lite reform models, but what sort of institutions do we need in the ongoing contest over where authority sits, whose knowledge matters, and whether the state can accommodate the plural forms of authority that the Te Tiriti relationship demands, and frankly, the implementation research obliges. The struggle with plurality is not a problem to be solved through more consultation hui or better co-design workshops. It is, I would offer, both the condition under which the state either maintains or fails to maintain a non-arbitrary rule for all who are subject to its authority, and whether it delivers local solutions to local problems, or tries to deliver Ōtautahi solutions in Te Kaha.

Yet the public administration scholarship has organised itself around entirely different questions. The literature I have been reviewing reveals how thoroughly the field has structured its analysis around the NPM/non-NPM binary. The daily operation of state authority gets examined as either market logic or resistance to market logic, contractualism or attempts to restore pre-contractual relationships, fragmentation or efforts at reintegration.

This framing treats 1984 and 1988 as the origin story and measures everything against what came before or after that moment. The constitutional struggle that actually defines Aotearoa’s administrative practice, lies in the 185-year pattern of oscillation between centralisation and decentralisation, the ongoing battle between concentrated and distributed authority, and the question of whether plural forms of authority can be accommodated, is placed outside the scholarship’s analytical frame. The NPM obsession allows scholars to focus on reform effects whilst avoiding the constitutional questions that Pettit, Te Tiriti, and Palmer all point toward.

Public servants, both elected and unelected, need scholarship that helps them navigate these constitutional questions, not endless refinement of what happened in 1984. They encounter daily the collision between centralised authority and problems that demand distributed solutions. Healthcare delivery depends on local relationships. Educational outcomes require community trust and whānau engagement. Infrastructure serves both regional and national patterns.

Most policy problems are intractable, insolvable, and interdependent, and cannot be resolved from the ninth floor of the Beehive. They require negotiation, adaptation, local knowledge, and the kind of plural authority that scholarship should help practitioners understand and operationalise. If political theory, public administration, public management, and public policy scholarship have one job, surely it is this: to help officials work within the enduring agonistic tussle that enables and inhibits their practice.

References:

Palmer, M. S. R. (2007). New Zealand constitutional culture. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 22(4), 565–597.

Pettit, P. (2022). The Function of the Polity. In The State (pp. 15–67). Princeton University Press

Footnote:

*Where political science examines the distribution and exercise of power within political systems, encompassing the study of theory, institutions, political behaviour, ideology, and constitutional arrangements, public administration, which is a sub-field of political science, concerns itself with the implementation of government policy and the operational functioning of bureaucratic organisations, with particular focus on the relationship between political executives and permanent officials. Public management, in contrast, developed as a distinct field during the New Public Management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, emphasising managerial techniques, performance measurement, and private sector practices applied to government service delivery. Public policy, whilst drawing on both political science and public administration, focuses specifically on the processes by which policy problems are identified, shaped and framed; policy options are formulated and selected; and policies are implemented and evaluated. Where political science asks questions about power and legitimacy, public administration examines how government actually works, public management focuses on how it might work more efficiently, and public policy analyses what government chooses to do and with what effect.