New Public Management in St. Lucia: The Challenge of Adoption and Implementation of NPM in St. Lucia’s Public Service

The Government of St. Lucia (GOSL) engaged in an ambitious programme of New Public Management (NPM) reform, under a Public Sector Reform (PSR) classification, and by their own assessment, this initiative was unsuccessful. Yet, no analysis of the failure was carried out and there is very little documented information. This study therefore aims to understand the reasons for this failure. This thesis also explores why St. Lucia adopted NPM; in a national environment unlike those for which it was designed. The qualitative approach and interpretive enquiry, permitted rich and indepth accounts to be gathered on the research phenomenon. Based on semi-structured interviews with public servants and trade unionists and the analysis of documentary evidence, the research finds a gap between the rhetorical convergence and the implementation convergence of NPM. Coerceive isomorphism and external infleunces appear to have greater weight for the adoption of NPM; in an environment that was ill equipped to engage in its implementation. Government embraced NPM as a panacea to its many public service challenges; despite their limited understanding of the concept. Thus, the attempt to redesign the public sector according to an imported model failed because neither the concepts underlying NPM, nor the challenges of implementation were properly understood. A greater investment in capacity building to equip implementers for policy analysis discussions and policy implementation may have had different results