(含：英文原文及中文译文)文献出处：Public Personnel Management, 12(2):159-166.英文原文New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping withthe New Political Governance in CanadaPeter AucoinA tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance, including good public administration, has long been assumed by those who regard the structures and practices advocated and brought about by NPM as departing from the principles and norms of good governance that underpinned traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated (Savoie 2008).As this dynamic has played out over the past three decades, however, there emerged an even more significant challenge not only to the traditional structures, practices and values of the professional, non-partisan public service but also to those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide, if not universal, acceptance as positive development in public administration. This challenge is what I call New Political Governance (NPG). It is NPG, and not NPM, I argue, that constitutes the principal threat to good governance, including good public administration, and thus the Quality of Government (QoG) as defined by Rothstein and Teorell (2008). It is a threat to the extent that partisans in government, sometimes overtly, mostly covertly, seek to use and overridethe public service –an impartial institution of government –to better secure their partisan advantage (Campbell 2007; MacDermott 2008 a, 2008b). In so doing, these governors engage in a politicization of the public service and its administration of public business that constitutes a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine good governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an intervening factor insofar as NPM reforms, among other reforms of the last three decades, have had the effect of publicly exposing the public service in ways that have made it more vulnerable to political pressures on the part of the political executive.I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at the case of Canada, but with a number of comparative Westminster references. I consider the phenomenon to be an international one, affecting most, if not all, Western democracies. The pressures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The responses vary somewhat because of political leadership and the institutional differences between systems, even in the Westminster systems. The phenomenon must also be viewed in the context of time, given both the emergence of the pressures that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new management-focused approach to public administration, and the emergence of the different pressures that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach to governance with important implications for public administration, and especially forimpartiality, performance and accountability.New Public Management in the Canadian ContextSince the early 1980s, NPM has taken several different forms in various jurisdictions. Adopting private-sector management practices was seen by some as a part, even if a minor part, of the broader neo-conservative/neo-liberal political economy movement that demanded wholesale privatization of government enterprises and public services, extensive deregulation of private enterprises, and significant reductions in public spending –‘rolling back the state’, as it was put a at the outset (Hood 1991). By some accounts, almost everything that changed over the past quarter of a century is attributed to NPM. In virtually every jurisdiction, nonetheless, NPM, as public management reform, was at least originally about achieving greater economy and efficiency in the management of public resources in government operations and in the delivery of public services (Pollitt 1990). The focus, in short, was on ‘management’. Achieving greater economy in the use of public resources was at the forefront of concerns, given the fiscal and budgetary situations facing all governments in the 1970s, and managerial efficiency was not far behind, given assumptions about the impoverished quality of management in public services everywhere.By the turn of the century, moreover, NPM, as improved public management in this limited sense, was well embedded in almost allgovernments, at least as the norm (although it was not always or everywhere referred to as NPM). This meant increased managerial authority, discretion and flexibility:• for managing public resources (financial and human);• for managing public-service delivery systems; and,• for collaborating with othe r public-sector agencies as well as with privatesector agencies in tackling horizontal – multi-organizational and/or multisectoral – issues.This increased managerial authority, flexibility and discretion was, in some jurisdictions, notably the Britain and New Zealand, coupled with increased organizational differentiation, as evidenced by a proliferation of departments and agencies with narrowed mandates, many with a single purpose. “Agencification’, however, was not a major focus reform in all jurisdictions, including Canada and Australia where such change, if not on the margins, was clearly secondary to enhanced managerial authority and responsibility (Pollitt and Talbot 2004).The major NPM innovations quickly led to concerns, especially in those jurisdictions where these developments were most advanced, about a loss of public service coherence and corporate capacity, on the one hand, and a diminished sense of and commitment to public-service ethos, ethics and values, on the other. Reactions to these concerns produced some retreat, reversals, and re-balancing of the systems in questions (Halligan2006). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale rejection of NPM, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action (Gregory 2006). The improvements in public management brought about by at least some aspects of NPM were simply too obvious, even if these improvements were modest in comparison to the original claims of NPM proponents.At the same time that NPM became a major force for change in public administration, however, it was accompanied by a companion force that saw political executives seeking to assert greater political control over the administration and apparatus of the state, not only in the formulation of public policies but also in the administration of public services. Accordingly, from the start, at least in the Anglo-American systems, there was a fundamental paradox as political executives, on both the left and the right sides of the partisan-political divide, sought to (re)assert dominance over their public-service bureaucracies while simultaneously devolving greater management authority to them (Aucoin 1990).The impetus for this dynamic lay in the dissatisfaction of many political executives with the ‘responsiveness’ of public servants to the political authority and policy agendas of these elected officials. Public choice and principal-agency theories provided the ideologicaljustifications for taking action against what were perceived as self-serving bureaucrats (Boston 1996). Beyond theory and ideology, however, the practice of public administration by professional public servants in some jurisdictions, notably Australia, Britain and New Zealand, offered more than sufficient evidence to political leaders of a public-service culture that gave only grudging acceptance, at best, to the capacity of elected politicians to determine what constituted the ‘public interest’ in public policy and administration.The Canadian case is of interest, I suggest, for several reasons. In comparative perspective, Canada did not approach public management reform with much of an ideological perspective. When the Conservatives defeated the centrist Liberals in 1984, neither the new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, nor his leading ministers were hardcore neo-conservatives in the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher mold. At that time, and until the end of the Conservative government in 1993, the party was essentially a centrist party in the Canadian ‘brokerage’ party tradition. While important aspects of neoliberalism unfolded, especially under the umbrella of economic deregulation that came with a free-trade agreement with the United States, there were no major administrative reforms that were politically driven. Pragmatism prevailed (Gow 2004). As a result, the reforms initiated during this period were essentially undertakings of the professional public-service leadership that sought tostay abreast with developments elsewhere. The scope and depth of these reforms were affected, however, by the extent to which ministers wanted to maintain an active involvement in administration (Aucoin 1995).By comparison to developments elsewhere, Canadian ministers were less inclined to worry about the professional public service being unresponsive to their political direction. Nonetheless, the Mulroney regime saw an expansion in the number, roles and influence of ‘political staff’ appointed to ministers’ offices, most notably in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). These staff, who have grown continuously in number over the past four decades, are not public servants, although they are employed on the public payroll. Unlike public servants, who are appointed independently of ministers, political staff are appointed and dismissed at the discretion of ministers and, of course, they have no tenure beyond their ministers. And, in official constitutional doctrine, they have no separate authority to direct the public service. In the Canadian tradition, moreover, they are appointed almost exclusively from partisan-political circles and appointees rarely possess any public service experience.For all these reasons, the Canadian government did not go as far down the NPM road as its three major Westminster counterparts (Australia, Britain and New Zealand) in terms of such matters as ‘agencification,’ devolution, term contracts for executives, external recruitment, or contracting-out. And, the reforms that did occur did notfundamentally transform the traditional administrative architecture. Throughout, there was retained, and even further developed:• an integrated public service, with the most senior levels drawn from the career public service and managed and deployed as a corporate executive resource;• departmental organizations, structured hierarchically with the minister as political executive and combining public policy and operational/service delivery responsibilities; and,• public administrative structures for addressing both corporate or governmentwide concerns and horizontal policy and service delivery issues.These features were seen as strengths of the Canadian approach (Bourgon 1998; Lindquist 2006; Dunn 2002).At the same time, reforms were initiated to improve public management that followed the principal NPM script: some measure of devolution of management authority from central management agencies to the senior public-service executives of line departments for (a) achieving greater economy and efficiency in the use of public resources, (b) improving service delivery, and (c) enhancing collaboration across departments to address those wicked ‘horizontal’ problems that defy government’s organizational boundaries (Bakvis and Juillet 2004).Further, in addressing one major challenge that was critical in thefirst years of NPM, namely, the fiscal crisis of the state in the latter part of the 20th century, the record of Canada was at first dismal and then dramatically successful. While the Conservative government, in power from 1984-93, was unable to wrestle annual deficits to the ground, a major program-budget review initiated following the Liberal Party victory in 1993 resulted, in surprisingly short order, in annual multi-billion dollar budget surpluses for over a decade – the best record in the G-8 nations (a group that does not include Australia which has had a similar experience with very large budget surpluses). On this front, political will and discipline, but not ideology, was a decisive force.By the first decade of the 21st century, moreover, Canada also came to be ranked first both in E-Government and in Service Delivery on one major international scorecard. On this front, the fact that the public service has been able to operate essentially on its own has helped spur progress. The Canadian emphasis on citizen-centred service drew inspiration from the NPM focus on ‘customers’ but, at the same time, paid serious attention to the priorities of citizens as defined by citizens –the outside-in perspective that enabled a significant advance in integrated service delivery structures and processes using multiple channels of service (Flumian, Coe and Kernaghan 2007). The Canadian methodology for this performance-based approach to service-delivery measurement and improvement is being adopted elsewhere in the Westminster systems.Finally, and clearly on a much less positive note, a good deal of attention has been required in Canada over the past decade to codes of ethics, public service values, transparency, comptrollership, and public accountability –thanks in large part to a series of alleged and real political-administrative scandals! Not surprisingly, this is where NPG and its effects on the quality of government can be witnessed in spades.中文译文新公共管理与政府素质：加拿大的新政府治理Peter Aucoin新公共管理（NPM）与善治之间的紧张关系，包括良好的公共管理，早已被那些认为公共产品管理倡导和带来的结构和做法背离了支持传统公众的善治原则和规范的人所认可管理（萨瓦1994）。
