ABSTRACT
The past fifteen years have evidenced a growing and diverse literature on how the work of government can be better secured. Public administration has embraced a remedial vocabulary of New Public Management, Reinventing Government, and New Governance. In a world where big business has become a global phenomenon, the need to reform bureaucracies and develop performance based public sector organizations has similarly crossed international borders, albeit perhaps that the receptiveness of innovation in this sphere is greatest in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This stirring of consciousness has been no better illustrated than by the analysis of Osborne and Gaebler in their 1992 book Reinventing Government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector. At the time, this established itself as a bestseller with its messianic tone capturing the Zeitgeist of politicians and practitioners that government should seek to become more catalytic, community owned, competitive, mission driven, results oriented, customer driven, enterprising, anticipating, decentralized, and market orientated. Notwithstanding the fundamental criticisms that there are limitations to a business-based paradigm derived from public accountability and public service imperatives, the debates on governance restructuring, which this book in part facilitated, have generated a momentum for change. There is now, as argued by Roberts (1999), a shared appreciation of the need to prune non essential programs, give managers more freedom to use resources wisely, focus on results rather than inputs, and rely more on the private sector for service delivery.
