Dr Linda Wang Dongfang

Home Institution: China University of Political Science and Law

Visiting Period: 15 May - 15 November 2011

Research Project: Comparing Public Administration Reform in New Zealamd and China: Analysis from the Perspective of Governance

Comparing Public Administration Reform in New Zealand and China: Analysis from the Perspective of Governance

During the late 80s, as the Public Administrative State expansion caused financial problems, trust issues, the plight of bureaucracy management plunged into a state of crisis when the study of public administration went through a paradigm of revolution from theory to practice. This paradigm of revolution embodied in theory the criticism of bureaucracy and the exploration of theoretical model for government remodeling, efficiency-oriented administration returned to the stage.

Based on the assumption that the government shares the same organizational characteristics with the market, a series of practices include breaking monopoly, deregulation, privatization and the introduction of market competition became the common topics for both theoretical and practical exploration. It also led a wave of worldwide administrative reforms, the wave was also known as the "New Public Management ".

In the process, the New Zealand administrative reform was hailed as a new model of public management by many countries. New Zealand reform took commercialization and privatization to resolve issues of imbalances in macroeconomic policies as a result of over government interventions; to improve public sector efficiency through separating decision-making and implementation processes, public services refinement and introducing healthy competition, organizational size degradation, strengthen cooperation and the sense of responsibility; the establishment of performance management mechanism which helped control inputs and outputs of the government sector; the establishment of performance agreements, floating systems for wages and for tenure to reform the traditional civil service system.

However, the new efficiency-oriented public management and commercialized government management system soon were challenged and questioned by democratic administration groups. Democratic administration returned to the constitutional framework exploring the role of government, emphasizing on the equality-oriented public administration, as well as re-defining the government's functions, duties and public service supply mechanism from the perspective of citizenship.

Therefore, how did New Zealand, the model for new public management reform respond to this? How has its public administration path been changed over the years? Especially, after a lapse of 30 years, how is the reality of the New Public Management-oriented reform resulted in real life operations? What kind of experiences are there to benefit or lessons to learn from? Are there any issues, needs and reform and innovations in today’s New Zealand?

These questions not only serve as an attempt to summarize the new public management reform, but also as inspirations to China's administrative reform. As it states, the description, experience analysis, problems summary and future outlook of the New Zealand public management reform is essential to this study. Relatively speaking, New Zealand is significant different in its political system, administrative systems and socio-culture from that of China.

What we want to focus more here is how the New Zealand government responds and establishes government management mechanisms under its governance structures; we will also attempt to summarize the governance of New Zealand through comparing local governance of China with that of New Zealand and through case analysis.