The development of Public Administration: from bureaucratic concepts to New Public Governance

Abstract

This article aims to try to understand the status of Public Administration (PA) concepts from the past to the present, using the term “paradigm” as the name for the period of public administration in each era. It also suggests that Thailand's public administration system should adjust its role to keep up with the current changes in public administration. This article is divided into 3 eras: 1. Public Administration paradigm, with the main model being the bureaucracy. This paradigm reached its peak between 1945 and 1979, especially in England, which was the period when the welfare state concept was popular. However, both public administration and the welfare state concept were later criticized by both academics and political elites in the form of the decline of the field of study, as well as the lack of real importance given to policy implementation and public service delivery, leading to a new paradigm in public administration: 2. New Public Management (NPM) in the late 1970s, which came with a clear form of public administration reform, namely the application of private sector management techniques to administration. However, the strength of public administration lies in the policy process, but the blurriness of this paradigm is that it does not care about the policy outcomes. While new public management has the strength of emphasizing outcomes, its disadvantage is that it does not care about the policy process or the context. Therefore, both paradigms fail to deal with reality. (In public services) which are more complex today. For this reason, the challenges of public administration in the present or the 21st century have scholars proposing a new paradigm in public administration as the 3rd paradigm, called the New Public Governance (NPG) paradigm.