(a) New Public Management has actually been a transitory state in evolution from traditional Public Administration to what is…

(a) New Public Management as a Transitory State to New Public Governance

Traditional Public Administration (TPA), rooted in Weberian bureaucracy and Wilsonian dichotomy, prioritized procedural compliance and hierarchical stability. From the late 1970s, fiscal crises and state inefficiencies drove reforms in Thatcher's Britain, New Zealand and Australia, which Christopher Hood labelled New Public Management (NPM) in "A Public Management for All Seasons?" (1991). He identified seven doctrines: hands-on professional management, explicit standards and measures of performance, emphasis on output controls, disaggregation of units, competition, private-sector styles of management, and discipline and parsimony in resource use.

However, NPM proved to be a transitory phase rather than a durable paradigm - the very phrase used by Stephen Osborne, who called NPM "a transitory stage in the evolution from traditional Public Administration to the New Public Governance" (2006). Patrick Dunleavy and colleagues went further, declaring in 2006 that "NPM is dead" and giving way to digital-era governance. Its core limitation lay in excessive managerialism and the commercialization of public service. Agencification and marketization created institutional fragmentation (siloization), eroded equity, inflated transaction costs, and reduced the democratic citizen to a mere transactional 'customer'.

To correct these pathologies, Osborne conceptualized New Public Governance (NPG), developed in his edited volume The New Public Governance? (2010). Grounded in institutional network theory, NPG shifts the focus from NPM’s intra-organizational competition to inter-organizational collaborative governance. It conceptualizes the state not as a firm, but as a coordinator within a complex ecosystem, viewing citizens as co-producers of public value (Mark Moore). In India, this transition is evident as administrative practice moves away from narrow NPM-style service metrics (Sevottam framework) toward NPG-aligned collaborative ecosystems, such as the convergence model of the Aspirational Districts Programme and Mission Karmayogi’s emphasis on networked, competency-driven governance.

(b) Mary Parker Follett: Pioneer of the Socio-Psychological Approach

Mary Parker Follett, through The New State (1918), Creative Experience (1924) and the lectures collected posthumously in Dynamic Administration (1941, edited by Metcalf and Urwick), served as a vital bridge between classical administrative mechanics and modern behavioral theory by placing human psychology and social relationships at the center of organizational study. Rejecting the rigid command-and-control structures of classical theorists, Follett posited the 'group process' as the fundamental building block of administration.

Follett introduced seminal concepts that revolutionized organizational dynamics. She advocated 'power-with' (coactive, joint power) over 'power-over' (coercive domination) and framed conflict as a normal, energetic process ("constructive conflict") that can be settled by domination, compromise or integration, preferring 'integration', where conflicting desires are synthesized without compromise or defeat. Her doctrine of the 'law of the situation' - "depersonalising" orders so that both manager and worker take orders from the situation - and of 'circular response' established that authority and communication are reciprocal, situational, and functional rather than strictly vertical. Her four principles of coordination - by direct contact, in the early stages, as a reciprocal relating of all factors, and as a continuing process - anticipated modern networked management, and Peter Drucker called her the "prophet of management".

These concepts directly laid the groundwork for subsequent organizational theorists. Follett’s group dynamics anticipated Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne studies on informal organization, while her concepts of authority and cooperation directly influenced Chester Barnard’s 'acceptance theory of authority'. Her humanistic vision prefigured Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y assumptions, and her view of the organization as an interconnected, situational whole anticipated open-systems and contingency theories.

(c) Public-Private Partnerships and Organizational Entropy

Organizational entropy, borrowed from thermodynamics, denotes the tendency of systems toward decay, disorder, and functional obsolescence. In Katz and Kahn's open-systems theory (1966), closed systems - such as a rigid Weberian bureaucracy - run down through rule-orientation, procedural inertia, and goal displacement, while open systems resist entropy by importing energy, information and resources from their environment ("negative entropy"), at the price of environmental volatility, vulnerability to market fluctuations, and resource dependency.

Under the NPM framework, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) challenge both forms of entropy by establishing a hybrid organizational model. PPPs mitigate closed-system entropy by dismantling bureaucratic monopolies, injecting private capital, operational agility, and technological innovation. Simultaneously, PPPs arrest open-system entropy by embedding unstable market transactions within formal public oversight, legal safeguards, and long-term relational contracting. Through structured risk-sharing, PPPs achieve a balance between market efficiency and democratic accountability.

In India, this hybrid mechanism is demonstrated by the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM), which insulates highway development from private revenue shocks while eliminating bureaucratic project delays. Similar hybridity is visible in airport PPPs at Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru and in the special purpose vehicles of the Smart Cities Mission. PPPs also show the limits of the model: the Delhi Airport Metro Express, a PPP line, was handed back by its private operator in 2013, many build-operate-transfer highway projects became stressed after 2012, and the Kelkar Committee on revisiting PPPs (2015) called for better risk allocation and an independent regulator.