Exploring the Legacies of New Public Management in Europe

This chapter proposes four ways to explore the legacies of New Public Management (NPM) in public bureaucracies in Europe. First, NPM contradictions as a global doctrine are emphasized to show how its mutability has favoured its resilience over decades. Second, we explain how and why its ideational dominance has been challenged in the early 2000s. Third, we pay attention to more complex forms of NPM institutionalization by tracking its ideas and instruments in the various institutional and temporal contexts where thy have been produced, translated, adopted and diversely entrenched in European governments. At last, we examine five significant and enduring redistributions of power that NPM instruments have generated in European public bureaucracies, thus suggesting that NPM effects are here to stay