Public Sector Reform Essay

For several decades public sector reform has been a focal discourse among researchers, scholars, development practitioners and governments. In developed and developing countries the public sector is a critical part of the state’s apparatus. It can be viewed as the engine of government in planning and implementing its approved policies and programmes. Thus, its effectiveness is of paramount importance in its quest for effective service delivery and accruing the benefits of development initiatives. Consequently, the inability of governments to effectively deliver public goods and services brings into sharp focus the need to evaluate and reform systems, processes and institutions to keep pace with that of developed societies and their mandates.

The main “drivers” of public sector reform are identified and a discussion is attempted. It also seeks to highlight the impact of the reform process on the state and

According to Larbi (2003) the introduction and transfer of a set of management techniques and practices, mostly associated with market and private-for-profit sectors, have been the driving forces to reform administration and management in government, in a variety of countries, notably the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Some of these practices have been applied in transitional and developing economies. These came to be known as the New Public Management. The decades of the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a transition from the Old Public Administration to the New Public Management. Robinson (2015), citing (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994; Denhardt and Denhardt, 2000; Osborne, 2006) argues that from 2000 there was a noticeable movement towards an emerging model variously termed the “new public service”, the “new public governance” or the “post-New Public Management”. The embedded philosophy in this approach is a bottom-up approach to government and a paradigm shift from elitism by public officials, rendering them more accountable to citizens and their political masters (Sutton,