The New Public Administration (NPA) Movement

Change in individuals, society, political systems, production, and consumption styles forces public administration to be flexible and adaptable, to understand change and its consequences, and to act accordingly.

The New Public Administration movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a response to the limitations of traditional public administration, driven by a growing recognition of the need for governments to address social issues and promote equity. It was shaped by a confluence of social upheaval, including civil rights movements, anti-war protests, and demands for greater accountability in governance.

In the U.S. and much of the developed world, significant social, economic, and administrative changes became evident in the
1960s. Such factors and changes as increasing and diversifying population and citizen demands, rapid suburbanization, social problems, war on poverty programs, new social movements, urban riots, anti-war protests, and the failure of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, among others, led to the birth of the new public administration (NPM) movement and increased concerns for social equality and responsiveness to citizen needs and choices.

This first Minnowbrook conference was organized by Dwight Waldo, a political scientist, with the help of three young scholars, namely H. George Frederickson, Henry Lambright, and Frank Marini.

The NPA movement emerged as a result of a meeting at Syracuse University’s Minnowbrook Conference Center in the Adirondack Mountains in New York in September 1968.

Waldo aimed at guiding and strengthening the discipline of public administration, making public administration a separate discipline on its own, and ensuring its independence from the discipline of political science.

The Minnowbrook II Conference was held in 1988 again at the Minnowbrook Conference Center in New York, 20 years after the first conference.

According to Gawthrop Minnowbrook I and II conferences were both realistic, and reflected a firm belief in democratic values, effectiveness, and equality.

The Minnowbrook II identified new conditions such as the interdependence and interconnectedness of policy issues, private public organizations, nation-states, and diversity in a variety of forms. Public administrators came to be seen as the central actors in an interconnected world, and public administration as the only sector that intersected with all other private, civic, political, social, and so forth.

40 years after the first convening, the Minnowbrook III Conference was held in the fall of 2008 in New York at the original Minnowbrook conference site at Blue Mountain Lake.

It was organized in two phases on the theme of “The Future of Public Administration, Public Management, and Public Service around the World.” Phase One of Minnowbrook III was a two-day workshop that included fifty-five young scholars, each of whom
was asked to prepare a short critique of the field of issues such as public administration theory, public financial and performance measurement, and of the values such as equity, subjectivity, diversity, representativeness, responsiveness, and relevance (Bryer, 2009: 112-113). Phase Two of the Minnowbrook conference took place in Lake Placid, New York, with around 220 scholars and practitioners of all ages and degrees of experience from 13 countries, including around 30 senior scholars of Minnowbrook I and II. Scholars and practitioners deliberated on and discussed the current state and future direction of the field and enduring theoretical, empirical, methodological, and conceptual debates in the field of public administration.

A special working group was formed at Minnowbrook III to deliberate on social equity and its role in the field of public administration, and proposed how this role could be improved to meet the needs of an ever-changing and diversifying society and environment.

• Public administration research and its link with practice, applicability, interdisciplinary and collaborative nature, relevancy, diversity in methodology, and subject matters.
• Publications that are timely, accessible, on pressing and relevant issues, and in new venues.
• Institutional motivation to conduct relevant applied research in an inclusive research community.
• Convenient dissemination settings and methods for public administration work that offer solutions to real problems and that would make a difference.
• Teaching that inspires imagination is technologically assisted, applied, and relevant.
• Learning through engagement and practice that produce outcomes and equip students with the needed competencies and skills to meet the challenges and demands of society.
• A culture within the field of public administration where scholars are relevant, practical, and making a difference through interdisciplinary international research and studies.

There was also Minnowbrook at 50 Conference held in 2018 by the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Minnowbrook I and honor the legacy of all the Minnowbrook conferences.

in many cases, it is called a new public administration or management movement (understanding or approach), or in Turkish, “yeni kamu yönetimi (YKY) anlayışı.” The latter use in Turkish leads to confusion, and the two separate and opposing views are mistaken as if they were the same approach.

The NPA movement asserted that public organizations were representative of the diversity in society, and that public administrators had to act as advocates for the underrepresented and just interests of the underprivileged as well as the common good.

1. Public administrators and agencies are not and cannot be neutral or objective; they are value-driven and protect citizens’ rights and social equity.
2. Technology is often dehumanizing but can be integrated to improve responsiveness, equity, and justice.
3. Bureaucratic authority and hierarchy are often ineffective, and bureaucracies tend toward goal displacement and survival. Thus, there is a need for a flatter structure and a decentralized governmental policy-making process.
4. The NPA movement attempts to define and improve theory-practice relations.
5. Participation and citizen-focus, leadership, cooperation, responsiveness, interdependency, social equity, adaptability, democracy, humanism, relevance, and adaptation to change are the main principles guiding organizations, as are efficiency, effectiveness, and economy.

The NPA movement is
Citizen and rights-centered, follows Public interest and common good, has Belief in the power of public administration to achieve
socio-economic progress in the regulated and controlled market system, covers Solidarity, efficiency, fairness, social equity,
responsiveness, and has Policy orientation wheres The NPM approach is Customer- and choice-oriented, follows Individual interest and personal benefit, has  Belief in the power of the free market and
limited state intervention covers Competition, individualism, productivity,
individualism, and has Managerial focus.

1. The NPA movement achieved limited success in living up to its expectations and ideals and delivering some of its ambitious claims to revolutionize the discipline and separate itself from political science.
2. Not being a unique approach or a totally new movement despite being called “new.” The pioneers of the movement wanted to solve the problems ignored by the classical public administration, but they were not successful enough in their effort to deserve the title of “new”.
3. The NPA movement focused on public administration ethics, yet it failed to effectively integrate bureaucratic and democratic ideals or theory and practice.
4. it has not been able to achieve a paradigm shift and has not replaced the modernist, classical, positivist, and/or technology-reliant public administration approaches.

According to the NPA movement, the organization of human activities could be carried out without the negative features
of bureaucracy such as routinization, rationalization, technicism, mechanization, and impersonalization.