Public management
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Public management is a perspective on government and non-profit administration which contends that public and private-sector management are alike in most important ways. As such, there are management tools to be taught to bureaucrats--whether public or private--and those are applied to maximizing [government] efficiency and effectiveness. This is often contrasted with the study of public administration, which emphasizes the public good as well as social and cultural drivers of government that many contend (e.g. Graham T. Allison and Charles Goodsell) make it inherently different from managing in the private sector.
Public management's study and teaching is often advanced in developed nations. Many best practice exchanges and specific credentials, e.g. the Master of Public Administration degree, include specific focus on decision making relevant to the public good using public infrastructure. While it includes also many more general public administration concerns, this degree somewhat parallels the Master of Business Administration. However private for-profitmanagement and firm-specific infrastructure are of a much smaller scale, typically, than public management concerns.
For instance, the FCM InfraGuide project focuses on the needs of Canadian cities, some of which are home to over a million people, very concentrated, subject to extreme weather conditions, and of extreme cultural diversity. The consequences of errors on this scale are profound and very often life threatening.
The scale and complexity of assets involved can be similar in private and public management. However, it is far more likely that the public manager will deal with critical infrastructure that directly and obviously impacts quality of life. It is far more common for a public service, e.g. municipal services, to be a monopoly - to have no competitors whatsoever.
The trust placed in public managers, and large sums spent at their behest, makes them subject to many more conflict of interest and ethics guidelines in most nations.
There are many entities that study public management in particular, in various countries, including:
- In the US, the American Society for Public Administration
- In Canada, the Professional Institute of the Public Service and various projects of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Infrastructure Canada
- In the UK, the UK local democracy project and London Health Observatory
- In France, the École nationale d'administration
A special focus of public management is government performance auditing by which the efficiency and effectiveness of two or more governments can be (within limits) compared. The use of ecological and social indicators is one of the methods most commonly advocated. In private enterprise, the term value reporting is roughly equivalent.
