New Zealand’s Model of Public Management (Essay Sample)

New Zealand’s Model of Public Management
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New Zealand’s public sector regularly emerges as a success story in the United Kingdom and international media. The largely celebrated Better Public Services (BPS) reform agenda, formerly launched in 2012 by the New Zealand government, is commendable in its aims. The New Zealand Government has issued ten priority results (or ‘outcomes’), in areas such as vulnerable children and welfare dependence, which require major cross-agency collaboration (Davison, 2016). The objective is to incentivize state services to act ‘less as a group of individual agencies, pursuing their own goals, and more as a system geared towards priority outcomes’. Parallel to this, each result has a named chief executive and minister who are answerable for its achievement. Progress against performance targets are regularly reported to the Cabinet and to the wider public. This establishes a level of scrutiny and transparency unheard of in other countries (Davison, 2016).
Besides this, significant efforts have been made to curtail some of the comprehensive changes made in the 1980s. New Zealand, compared to other countries, took New Public Management reforms to a higher level. Performance of departments is determined by outputs and governed by a ’contract’ between chief executives and ministers (the equivalent of the UK’s Permanent Secretary Grade); these reinforce firm vertical accountabilities for the provision of agency-specific outcomes (Scott, 1990). This model has clear advantages –high performance and efficiencies in clearly defined sections – but leaves hardly any incentives for public servants to work jointly to confront complex problems (Bale, 19