New Millennium,New Public Management and the New Zealand Model

Recently the much‐discussed ‘New Zealand model’ of new public management (NPM) has become significantly revised. It now lacks the theoretical coherence and the market‐led focus that it relied on between 1987 and 1996. Labour‐led governments since 1999 have undertaken gradual and pragmatic – yet significant – changes in public management structures and principles, refining and sometimes reversing the model implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article does a ‘stock‐take’ of public management developments in New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and argues that New Zealand can no longer be viewed as a leading exponent of market‐led NPM. Some NPM principles have been refined, but others have been quietly abandoned. The new National‐led government appears unwilling to undertake radical reforms, and, while it may seek a greater role for the private sector, looks set to continue with the ‘gradual and pragmatic’ approach adopted since 1999.     

The New Enclosures: London,New York City,Philadelphia, and the Transformation of Public Space

ABSTRACT

In recent years, social movements have taken to the streets to protest various forms of economic and racial injustice. However, these attempts to exploit the political opportunities public spaces afford have been compromised by the increasingly private nature of “public” spaces. What has changed is the rise of privately owned public spaces (POPS), areas that appear to be public, but in fact are owned by corporations that prohibit a range of activities, including political protest. This article argues such restrictions of public space are not limited to POPS. Rather, they are just one expression of a far more pervasive phenomenon, novel variations on centuries-old practices by which common or public land has been enclosed. I suggest that four forms of enclosure -for profit, of behavior, of community, and of the public realm- degrade the status of public institutions and insulate private interests from counter-mobilization by groups pursuing egalitarian ends.     

Justice,Efficiency, and the New Public Management

In this article I aim to explore the link between two normative values, namely justice and efficiency, and the New Public Management approach. In pursuing this task I offer several critical arguments against some of the recent justice‐based objections levied against New Public Management by David Arellano‐Gault. I claim that Arellano‐Gault's account of the relation between justice and the New Public Management is seriously undermined by two conceptual flaws: (1) a conflation of right‐libertarianism, utilitarianism, and desert theories of justice and (2) a conflation of the technical/productive sense of efficiency with the social/distributive sense. Furthermore, I maintain that even when the different theories of justice and the different senses of efficiency are properly delineated, the case for necessarily linking NPM to a particular theory of justice is markedly unconvincing.     

Collaborative Innovation,New Technologies,and Work Redesign

Stakeholders agree on the need to promote innovation in work organization in public services. This article deploys the concept of collaborative innovation to discuss employees' and managers' experiences of a major technology‐driven work redesign project within National Health Service pharmacy services in Scotland. The authors draw on extant literature on New Public Management (NPM) and collaborative approaches to innovation to frame more than 40 in‐depth interviews with managers and employees. They find that key components of collaborative innovation—related to joint problem‐solving, interdisciplinary working, and mutual learning—were important to the success of the redesign project and had positive impacts on job quality for some employees. The authors argue that researchers and policy makers should look beyond NPM‐driven models that have dominated some areas of the public innovation literature to consider the potential added value of collaborative innovation to improving both work and service delivery in the public sector.     

New Region,New Story: Imagining Mobile Subjects in Transnational Space

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make new transnational governmental territories by breathing life into the imagined mobile subjects of these future territories. These mobile subjects play a central part in the politics of emergent transnational governmentalities and in legitimising potential border-crossing infrastructures. In a case study of the COINCO project (Corridor of Innovation and Co-operation), linking Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin, it is shown how deconstructing imagined mobile subjects reveals the will to power over mobility and sheds light on how governmental practices are remaking European borders.     

Globalisation, Ecological Modernisation and New Labour

Ecological modernisation (EM) provides the principal framework within which environmental policy reform projects are understood. However, writers using the approach, neglect to explain the political contexts within which it is possible to pursue such projects. Specifically, they ignore how discourses of globalisation structure the attempts of states to introduce environmental policy measures consistent with EM agendas. Through an analysis of the UK government's attempts to introduce policies consistent with an EM approach, we show that New Labour's discourse of globalisation acts to create opportunities for EM in some policy arenas and hinder them in others. We examine the development of a renewable energy strategy, the case of genetically modified foods, and transport policy. By specifying conditions under which EM may be pursued, the analysis reveals the potential, but also the limits, of this approach, which attempts to ignore the deep political questions raised by environmental degradation.