‘Desperately seeking Susan..?’ In
search of innovation in the New
Public Governance
Professor Stephen P Osborne,
Chair in International Public Management,
University of Edinburgh Business School,
Scotland
This presentation
• Genesis of the New Public Governance (NPG)
• Key challenges of the NPG
• Enabling innovation under conditions of the
NPG
• ‘The one-liner’
I - Genesis of the NPG
• Public Administration (PA)
• The New Public Management (NPM)
• The New Public Governance (NPG)
• Not a linear history but a layering added
complexities
Public Administration
• Focus on implementation of public policy and
administration of law
• Politics-administration dichotomy
– Flawed in enactment
– Public officials as self-serving elite and little
genuine citizen engagement
– Inefficient allocation of public resources
New Public Management
• Management of public services not
administration of policy, with disaggregation of
services to units/unit costs
• Focus on efficient allocation of public resources
and (variable) focus on markets and competition
• Performance management and output control
• Re-casting of citizens as customers
• Draws upon managerial theory developed from
experience of the manufacturing sector
– A product-dominant and intra-organisational business
logic
But…
• ‘The world has changed’
– Fragmented
– No longer possible for one organisation to meet
social/economic need in isolation
• Current public management theory not ‘fit for purpose’
, if it ever was
– Policy not service-user focus
– Product not service orientation (outputs not processes)
– Intra-organizational focus in a plural and pluralist world
New Public Governance
(Osborne 2006, 2010)
• Acknowledges fragmentation of needs
• Embraces plural and pluralist service delivery
• Focus on inter-organisational relationships and service
systems
• From administration and management to negotiation
and governance
– Of needs, service delivery, and outcomes
• Service users as co-producers
• A different, service-dominant, business logic (Osborne
et al 2013): beyond the ‘missing product’ of public
services delivery
Two caveats…
• NPG is not a normative term but a descriptive
and evaluative one
• NPG does not replace the administrative or
managerial imperatives of PA or NPM – it
adds a new layer of complexity that conditions
the other two
II - Key challenges of delivering public
services under conditions of the NPG
• Beyond product-dominant to (public) servicedominant business logic
• Beyond silo organisations and interorganisational relations to public service
systems
• Beyond policy dominance to a user
orientation
A public service-dominant business
logic (Osborne et al 2013)
• Public service delivery is not a process of
manufacture but of service realisation
– Public services are not tangible goods: there is no
‘missing product’ but a process of service delivery
– Public service delivery is about the transformation of
(professional) knowledge to produce added value for
end-users (Lusch & Vargo 2006)
– You cannot separate production from consumption: all
public services are co-produced by users and staff
– The service system is the key unit of analysis
The service system
• Beyond inter-organisational working to service
systems
– Public policy creation is a pluralist process:
negotiation between stakeholders
– Public service delivery requires plural elements: public
service organisations, staff, hard and soft technology,
end-users, communities…
– Not just inter-organisational working and networks
but service systems
• Moving from closed and natural systems to open systems
– A process of negotiation and governance to produce
public services
Making a reality of ‘user orientation’:
Co-production
• ‘User orientation’ and co-production a long time goal
of public policy
• BUT
– Seen as an add-on, under professional/political
domination
• The reality
– (public) service-dominance logic identifies co-production
as an inalienable element of service delivery: this way to
‘best practice’…
– ‘The lunatics are taking over the (public policy) asylum…’
(Bekker et al 2011)
– Towards consumer, participative and enhanced coproduction (Osborne & Strokosch 2013)
NPG: five implications for innovation
I
• From manufacturing design to process
governance: from the ‘missing product’ to
‘realising the promise’ (Osborne et al 2013)
– ‘Hard’ innovations can support public services but..
– Away from R&D and technocratic dominance
– Meshing user expectations and experience to produce
performance
• From rivalrous competition to open
(collaborative) innovation
– Share risks, costs, knowledge - and benefits
NPG: five implications for innovation
II
• Innovation is socially constructed within social
systems (Osborne & Brown 2011)
– What is acceptable?
• ‘Pin down’ and biometric ID
• Risk is (also) socially constructed (Brown &
Osborne 2013)
– From technocratic risk management to risk
governance
– Who are the stakeholders?
– How much risk, for what benefit?
NPG: five implications for innovation
III
• The user is at the centre of public service
innovation (Osborne & Strokosch 2013, Radnor &
Osborne 2013)
– Co-production not an ‘add-on’ but the driver
– ‘Sticky knowledge’ plus professional knowledge leads
to innovation
– From R & D and policy dominance to understanding
the reality of co-production in service systems
• Beyond the technocratic and political imperatives to
innovation rooted in a public service-dominant logic
The ‘one-liner’ for the NPG?
• Service users (not technocrats, politicians or
professionals) are at the heart of the public
service system and drive public service
innovation across that system
– Their needs, their public services, their
innovations, their outcomes