Public administration as a discipline and practice is once again at an inflection point. Over the past four decades, administrative reform has oscillated between the rigidity of Weberian bureaucracy and the flexibility of managerialism under the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm.
Yet, as governments grapple with crises of legitimacy, equity, and public trust, it has become clear that neither rule-bound formalism nor market-based governance alone can sustain democratic accountability.
The NPM movement, born out of the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century, reimagined governance through the lens of business efficiency. It sought to make governments more “entrepreneurial” by prioritizing performance indicators, cost control, and customer satisfaction.
While this doctrine undoubtedly improved service responsiveness and introduced managerial innovation, it also depoliticized governance by reducing citizens to customers and treating the public good as a commodity.
As a result, scholars such as B Guy Peters and Jon Pierre have argued for recalibrating the NPM ethos rather than rejecting it entirely.
The concern is not that efficiency is unimportant, but that administrative performance cannot replace legitimacy.
Trust, equity, and accountability are not residual values, they are constitutive of public value itself.
Thus, the need to balance “doing things right” with “doing the right things,” recognizing that governance is as much a moral enterprise as a managerial one.
In order to explore an optimum framework for next generation public administration, it is very crucial to understand the key dilemmas of modern administration.
Modern administrative thought identifies governance not by fixed principles but by enduring tensions that must be continually managed. These include neutrality versus responsiveness, autonomy versus integration, simplicity versus complexity, rationality versus incrementalism, and authority versus democracy. Each tension captures a structural dilemma inherent in governance systems.
The classical Weberian bureaucracy emphasized neutrality, rule-bound impartiality as the guarantor of fairness. Yet, today’s citizens expect empathy, adaptability, and problem-solving from the government.
Excessive neutrality leads to detachment, excessive responsiveness risks politicization. The challenge lies in cultivating an administrative ethos that is professionally independent yet socially attuned.
Besides, it is important to understand how autonomy collides with integration. Professional autonomy protects bureaucrats from political interference, but excessive autonomy fosters fragmentation. In an era of networked governance, effective administration requires “integrated autonomy,” the ability of agencies to act independently within collaborative frameworks that ensure coherence across sectors and levels of government.
Another aspect of the dilemma is the confrontation between simplicity v complexity. Modern governance operates in a “complex adaptive system” of actors and institutions. While simplicity in rules aids clarity, governance problems -- from climate change to digital regulation -- demand multi-level coordination. The challenge lies in designing administrative mechanisms that simplify citizen experience without oversimplifying policy realities.
Whether we opt for rationality or incrementalism is also a pertinent question. While rational planning remains a normative ideal, empirical evidence shows that most reform unfolds incrementally, through political negotiation and institutional learning. Recognizing the legitimacy of incrementalism allows reformers to avoid the pitfalls of technocratic overconfidence.
Perhaps the most fundamental dilemma concerns the balance between technocratic authority and democratic accountability.
Expertise is indispensable, but legitimacy cannot derive from expertise alone. Transparent, participatory governance remains essential for maintaining public consent and institutional trust.
The “next public administration” thus does not discard its predecessors but synthesizes them, fusing the procedural discipline of classical bureaucracy (rule of law, accountability) with the flexibility and innovation of managerial governance (performance, customer orientation).
This hybrid model reflects post-NPM scholarship, which views governance as an interdependent system of networks rather than a top-down hierarchy and reintroduces the moral and normative dimensions that managerialism had marginalized. The key argument of reform is not to replace efficiency with ethics but to embed ethics within efficiency.
Why it matters for Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, administrative reform continues to grapple with tensions between bureaucratic tradition and managerial modernization. Successive reforms, from administrative restructuring in the 1990s to the “Digital Bangladesh” agenda, have sought to modernize the bureaucracy, improve service delivery, and embed performance culture.
These initiatives have achieved measurable gains in digital governance and transparency. Yet, they operate within a bureaucratic culture that remains deeply hierarchical and politicized. Centralized administrative authority, reinforced by political patronage, often suppresses local-level autonomy and participatory governance.
Likewise, the conflict between neutrality and responsiveness manifests in a civil service that must reconcile professional integrity with political loyalty frequently at the expense of both. This imbalance perpetuates public distrust and undermines the legitimacy of reform.
The next public administration framework offers Bangladesh a conceptual and practical lens to reconcile the contradictions between bureaucratic traditionalism and managerial modernisation.
Reform efforts must move beyond procedural tinkering to embrace the deeper principles of legitimacy, ethics, and citizen engagement. This means institutionalizing merit-based recruitment and promotion, strengthening local government autonomy, and creating platforms for deliberative citizen participation.
The future of Bangladesh’s governance depends on its ability to balance performance with purpose. Administrative reform cannot be a technocratic exercise but instead a moral project grounded in public trust. We need a balance -- a governance system that learns, adapts, and deliberates, that measures success not merely by efficiency metrics but by fairness, inclusion, and accountability.
For Bangladesh, this vision offers both a diagnostic and a prescription: To reimagine governance not as an instrument of control, but as a collaborative pursuit of the public good. The challenge is to craft institutions that not only do things right but consistently strive to do the right things.
Dr Mohammad Kamrul Hasan is a Public Administration and Public Policy Analyst.