2.4 Concerns and unresolved questions in public management
New Zealand's public-sector reforms in the decade after 1984 established it at the forefront of international thinking about public management and the role of the state. That level of international recognition was well justified at the time, but after 25 years it is not surprising that there is an increasing awareness of the challenges in public management that were not resolved by the reforms of that period. The continuing dilemmas include:
- The boundaries between the state and the private sector, including:
- the case for public investment where the private sector is unwilling to invest, and
- the allocation of ownership and service delivery between the private and public sectors.
- The place of competition in the public sector and, in particular:
- the role of competition in promoting greater efficiency in the delivery of services and the management of assets within the public sector, and between the public and private sectors, and
- the balance between competitive discovery of efficient solutions to operational and organisational problems, and single national approaches to investment and public-sector infrastructure.
- The need for stronger individual and organisational incentives for performance, and more effective mechanisms for the measurement and monitoring of that performance. Gill and Hitchener (2010:498) argue that while the vertical structures of accountability created under the Public Finance Act and the State Sector Act were designed to allow greater scrutiny of performance of ministers, chief executives and their departments or agencies, in practice there is relatively little use of performance information by central agencies, other than as a measure of bottom-line performance when things go wrong, and that this has tended to reinforce rather than mitigate the “well known bureaucratic pathologies of public organisations, in particular risk-averse, rule-driven behaviour.”
- The effectiveness of the governance and management of the public sector as a whole, including the role of advisory and governance boards, the central monitoring agencies, and the challenge of producing more effective mechanisms for solving problems and developing innovative new approaches to policy where policy issues span the mandates of multiple teams and multiple government organisations. Scott et al (2010) point out that there have been consistent concerns about the ability of the public sector to deliver quality and innovative policy advice on the big issues that are of relevance to multiple departments and entities.
