Co-existence? NPM in a network world

This chapter discusses the role and the importance of New Public Management (NPM), in a changing world, where the network paradigm has been adopted in public sector entities. The focus is on performance management, a seminal feature of the NPM since its inception, which has been hardly criticiszed by network proponents. In the NPM paradigm, performance management plays a central role which is intended to ensure an efficient and effective service delivery. The context in which NPM developed was characterised by an emphasis on accountability, pushing towards the disaggregation of the heavy public sector in subunits, with the desire to trace more easily the responsibility between input and outputs. This theoretical configuration of a single institution in charge of service delivery facilitated the promotion of measures for management and control. This chapter examines the tensions in three organisations which individually have NPM performance management systems, but which collectively have an overarching governance system.