Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 Implications of Neoliberal Reforms in Public Governance for Democratic Potentials in Developing Nations: A Critique

Description

In postcolonial developing countries, although the colonially inherited public governance system largely functioned as an instrument of the state often under authoritarian regimes, most of these countries adopted reforms to expand the public sector and strengthen its role to enhance socioeconomic progress, to ensure people’s entitlement to basic needs and services, and ironically, to increase public participation through various associations or organizations. However, these state-centric trends of reforms were significantly reoriented (reversed) during the recent decades dominated by the rise of neoliberal anti-state and anti-bureaucratic ethos and adoption of concomitant businesslike policies and reforms based on pro-market assumptions or principles. These recent market-driven policies and reforms – e.g. privatization, deregulation, liberalization, downsizing, outsourcing, de-subsidization, disaggregation, performance-orientation, and customer choice – have been encapsulated largely as New Public Management (NPM), followed by its revisionist (post-NPM) frameworks like shared governance, good governance, digital-era governance, and so on. Originating from advanced capitalist nations, the neoliberal NPM model increasingly emerged as almost a global model despite its cross-national divergence and convergence, especially in the developing world. While these neoliberal reforms in public governance have been pursued in the name of greater efficiency, transparency, participation, and accountability (prescribed ingredients of good governance), the actual implications have often been anti-democratic for many developing nations where such businesslike reforms have not only eroded citizens’ social rights due to the shrinking public employment and welfare services, but also diminished people’s political rights due to the de-recognition of workers’ privileges, fragmentation of public interest into individualistic consumer choices, replacement of public opinion by expert opinion in assessing performance, and so on. This paper aims to explore this paradoxical consequence of globalizing the neoliberal model of governance and its adoption (by imposition or imitation) in developing nations, especially with regard to the gaps between the model’s declared mission to realize democratic good governance on the one hand, and its actual outcome such as the loss of people’s democratic rights and entitlements on the other.

Professor M. Shamsul Haque (Ph.D.) is with the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. Specialized in public administration, his research interests cover diverse related issues such as development theory, public sector reform, administrative ethics, public accountability, gender representation, sustainable development, non-government organization, and so on. He has published four books and about sixty refereed articles in journals such as Public Administration Review, Administration & Society, Governance, Public Management Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences, International Journal of Public Administration, International Political Science Review, etc. He is the Editor of Asian Journal of Political Science and Deputy Editor of International Review of Administrative Sciences. At this seminar, he would like to share his current research on the contemporary neoliberal reforms in public governance and their critical/ adverse impacts on democratization in the developing world.