The Minnowbrook Conference (USA, 1968) gave rise to ‘New Public Administration’ in the late 1960s.
E.g.: Frank Marini (ed) ‘Towards a New Public Administration’ contains the proceedings of this seminar.
New Public Administration puts the focus on morals, ethics and values. It rejects the idea that administrators must be value-neutral. On the contrary, it finds a place for values and examines the possible conflicts in value clusters. It upholds bureaucratic responsiveness, citizen participation in decision-making, social equity and administration responsibility for programme effectiveness as constituents of public service ethic. The emphasis must be proactive and client-oriented rather than being exclusively concerned with the virtues of economy and efficiency in administration.
E.g.: Dwight Waldo (ed), ‘Public Administration in a Time of Turbulence (1971)’
Minnowbrook I vs. Minnowbrook II
The two Minnowbrook differed in respects of composition, tone and orientation, thematic emphasis and social environment.
| Minnowbrook I (1968) | Minnowbrook II (1988) | |
| Its composition was narrow in the sense that most of the participants had a political science background. | 1. (Composition) | Its composition was wider in the sense that the participants had been trained in law, economics. planning. policy analysis, policy studies and urban studies. |
| Its mood, tone, temper and orientation was contentious, confrontational, radical, and revolutionary. | 2. (Tone) | Its mood, tone, temper and orientation was more civil, more practical, more pragmatic, less radical and more respectful to senior professionals. |
| It laid emphasis on relevance, values, social equity, change, and client-focus. | 3. (Emphasis) | It laid emphasis on leadership, constitutional and legal perspective, technology policy and economic perspectives. |
| It was decidedly anti-behavioural. | 4. (Impact) | It was more perceptive to the contributions of the social and behavioural sciences to public administration. |
| Its social environment was marked by strong cynicism towards government. It challenged public administration to be more pro-active to major social issues. | 5. (Social Environment) | Its social environment was marked by a growing demand for retreat of the state in the forms of governmental cutbacks, privatization, voluntarism, social capacity building and third-party government. It retreated from an action perspective. |
Criticism
- It was criticized as anti-positivist, anti-theoretic and anti-management.
- Robert T. Golembiewski describes it as ‘revolution or radicalism in words, and (at best) status-quo in skills or technologies’. He further considers it as a temporary or transitional phenomena and thought that wisdom might be to simply allow its memory to further fade away.
- Campbell argues that it ‘differs from the old public administration only in that it is responsive to a different set of societal problems from those of others periods’.
Conclusion
In spite of the above limitations, Nigro and Nigro observe that the new public administration has seriously jolted the traditional concepts and outlook of the discipline and enriched the subject by imparting a wider perspective and by linking it closely to the society.