Public management has become modernized in many ways during the last decades, with dynamics pointing in opposite directions. One important move, epitomized by the rise (and continuity) of New Public Management, has been the... [ view full abstract ]
Public management has become modernized in many ways during the last decades, with dynamics pointing in opposite directions. One important move, epitomized by the rise (and continuity) of New Public Management, has been the import of steering tools from private business but also engaging in co-production of services that focuses on the benefits achieved and the overlap between the activities of regular producers and consumers (Brudney and England 1983). However, the coproduction has tended in recent years to also refer to some type of synergistic relationship between government and community groups (Bovaird, 2007; Alford, 2009; Fledderus, Brandsen, and Honingh, 2013)).
Furthermore, many countries have seen new approaches of involving third parties across sectoral boundaries. The rationale behind such collaborative public management certainly was multi-faceted, but one prominent idea was to give citizens a better voice when it comes to the provision of public services, by making nonprofit organizations a partner of Government and by creating new forms involving groups of citizens into public service provision (e.g. the co-production of services or public consultations in infrastructure planning). The public management literature highlights citizen participation as a key element in deliberative governance. However, the literature often focuses on the individual rather than the collective (Fung 2006) although individual expressions of voice are often then organized into collective vehicles such as committees.
Concomitantly, collective civic action (social movements, advocacy organizations, public interest groups) challenge the public sector in novel ways. The result is a somehow paradoxical configuration: civic voice meats public sector managerialism. While the latter is based on a combination of an ‘exit’ (quasi-market) and a ‘loyalty’ (hierarchical) logic, the latter proves volatile and capricious, hence difficult ‘to manage’. The paper presents examples of this configuration from different parts of the world and discusses whether we can discern here a new global tension field in the management of public service provision. In this paper, we aim to broaden the discussion. Citizens can act collectively or individually, can act in undisclosed way (unknown to others, citizen feedback not disclosed to public) or disclosed (not secretive) and can act within or outside of government formal mechanisms for citizen engagement.
