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The decline in popularity of New Public Management worldwide reinvigorated the search for a new paradigm in the field of public administration. Several alternatives to New Public Management, such as the New Governance and Public Value paradigms, have gained prominence in recent years. Despite tensions among these paradigms, exceptional challenges for public administration teaching programs exist. Xun Wu and Jingwei He of the National University of Singapore compiled data on public administration and management courses from 48 top master of public administration degree programs in China and the United States. This essay analyzes how competing paradigms influenced the selection of course content and pedagogical foci in professional training curricula. The authors conclude that in order to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity provided by the rapid, global expansion of professional education in public administration, there is an urgent need to find a synthesized theoretical framework.
New Public Management (NPM) has emerged as a key approach in shaping public sector reforms in the last two decades. The failures of government in maintaining economic stability, protecting environmental quality, and reducing poverty have led to a search for leadership and innovative solutions outside the public sector, and NPM has been enthusiastically embraced in many countries. The prospect that NPM would become the new paradigm in public administration, however, has become increasingly doubtful as more attention has turned to its less than satisfactory performance in practice. Its critics argue that reform initiatives guided by NPM have undermined other fundamental values in governing public affairs, such as fairness, justice, representation, and participation, in the name of improving efficiency (deLeon and Denhardt 2000; Frederickson 1997).
The decline of NPM has reinvigorated the search for a new paradigm in public administration. Building on rhe growing popularity of the concept of governance, some scholars have proposed the "New Governance" paradigm, which seeks to reconfigure the role of the public sector through citizen participation and network governance (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O'Leary 2005; Boyte 2005). The concept of public value, first articulated by Moore (1995), has also attracted considerable attention among scholars and practitioners alike (Alford 2002; Smith 2004; Stoker 2006). The "Public Value paradigm" has emerged as another alternative to NPM (O'Flynn 2007). The decline of NPM has also rekindled the interest in...