New Public Management (NPM) made a simple promise: to run inefficient public services like they were efficient private businesses. Where privatisation was not possible, the idea was to implement market-like processes: league tables, audits, quantitative evaluation, outsourcing, and dividing the public sector into ‘purchasers’ and ‘providers’. Imposing market discipline would supposedly drive standards up and costs down by transforming the state into a ‘firm’ and citizens into ‘consumers’.
Yet NPM – as a hard-edged programme of marketisation – never existed.
When LSE academic Christopher Hood popularised the term NPM in the early 1990s, he used it to describe the Thatcherite revolution in the way the British government debated, designed, implemented and evaluated public service provision. But by treating NPM as a coherent restructuring of public bureaucracies in the image of the market, he and others since have frequently positioned it simply as another feature of the neoliberal revolution.
