2.5 Conclusion
All ideas are shaped by the intellectual context in which they were formed, and New Zealand's post-1984 public management reforms were no exception. Those reforms were built on innovative applications of the academic literature of the time, and were successful in addressing many of the biggest problems associated with the public sector that had emerged from the earlier period of widespread government ownership and control of the economy. Many aspects of the performance of what remained within the public sector were improved by the reforms. But a wide range of challenges in public management and performance remains to be addressed, while some aspects of the post-1984 reforms appear not to have worked as anticipated or to have not worked at all. In the remainder of this paper we consider whether a range of new developments in the academic literature suggests opportunities for alternative and potentially superior approaches to addressing some of these issues in public management.
