Record Details

Bridging the Gap Between Reform Practices and Literatures: New Public Service Delivery of Japanese Local Governments

International Public Management Review

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Bridging the Gap Between Reform Practices and Literatures: New Public Service Delivery of Japanese Local Governments
 
Creator Kudo, Hiroko
 
Description Many Japanese local governments introduced New Public Management (NPM) in the mid/late nineties. Most of them introduced performance measurement, programme evaluation, customer satisfaction surveys, outsourcing and/or contracting out to the private sector, revision of public service delivery, PFI, and PPP (Kudo, 2003). Local public services have been mostly outsourced to private and social sectors.After a decade of these experiences, some municipalities have started to distance themselves from the NPM-driven managerial style. After monitoring and evaluating their performance and considering customer satisfaction, some decided not to renew contracts to their private partners, to bring the service back to public administration, or to introduce new forms of collaboration between public and private sectors, mainly based on proposals from the private sector.The author has been taking part in a research group, which previously surveyed the financial situation of Japanese local governments and their managerial choices (Kudo, 2010) and recently conducted an extensive survey among municipalities to see if they were either in favour of NPM oriented managerial styles or if they were introducing New Public Governance (NPG) oriented (Osborne, 2006; Bovaird, 2007) approaches. Some ways to understand this shift are: 1) putting more importance on citizen participation than cost cutting; 2) preference of PPP to simple outsourcing; and 3) consideration of political accountability (Bakvis and Jarvis, 2012) in administrative implementations. The questioners turn to mayors and financial directors to understand the political as well as economic influences on these choices.The results of the survey and some interviews conducted with mayors and public servants show that some municipalities have shifted from NPM-driven management to public service delivery based on NPG (Pestoff, 2011), although they are rarely aware of the theoretical transition. The examples are small in number, and do not necessary confirm the theoretical framework of public service delivery under NPG (Hartley, 2005), since the reasons of these shifts vary among municipalities.The experiences of Japanese local government would make an interesting lesson for many countries with late introduction of NPM. Japanese NPM demonstrates several characteristics: 1) its NPM has been introduced with some elements of public governance without being recognised; 2) very strong and still dominant attention on NPM; and 3) less attention on NPG, since NPM results in self-reform and learning process of public servants, especially at the local level (Kudo, 2010). The paper analyses the results of the survey in relation to the Japanese literatures on public governance.
 
Publisher International Public Management Review
 
Contributor —
 
Date 2015-05-28
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
—
 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier http://journals.sfu.ca/ipmr/index.php/ipmr/article/view/250
 
Source International Public Management Review; Vol 16, No 1 (2015); 147-164
1662-1387
 
Language eng
 
Relation http://journals.sfu.ca/ipmr/index.php/ipmr/article/view/250/246
 
Rights Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License that allows others to share the work for non-commercial use with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.2. Authors and IPMR are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, distribute it via EBSCO, or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.