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Blog posted by: Henry Kippin, 04 January 2017

Henry Kippin examines a striking new theory about public servants.

Twice a year I travel to Singapore to work with colleagues at the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Centre for Public Service Excellence (UNDP GCPSE).

In November I spent time with government ministers from Ethiopia, public officials from South Africa and Cambodia, development professionals from Kosovo and Kazakhstan, and civil society leaders from Singapore.

I always learn a lot. And sometimes, the best thing is hearing new ways of talking about the things Collaborate works on and cares about in the UK — spoken in different languages and communicated in a different context. Public service excellence is a subjective concept. But there are some things that feel quite fundamental and maybe even universal.

Last month the Global Centre published papers by Ryan Orange and Max Everest-Philips which make the case for what Ryan has called the ‘New Public Passion’. This is a play on the practice of New Public Management, with a specific focus on the motivation of public servants and the role this can play in supporting (or hindering) service excellence and better outcomes. It makes for a welcome contribution to the debate in the UK, and Collaborate will be partnering with the UNDP Global Centre in the New Year to explore it further.

The motivation of public servants has a fairly rich academic hinterland: think Julian Le Grand’s ‘knights and knaves’, Michael Lipsky’s ‘street level bureaucrats’, and recent efforts by Catherine Needham and colleagues to define the ‘twenty-first century public servant’. I have made a small contribution on the topic of public entrepreneurship, and Nick Timmins and David Archer (amongst others) write compellingly on the emergence of system and collaborative leadership.

The New Public Passion is striking because it replaces the well trodden and oft discredited concept of New Public Management with something more immediate and from the gut. It speaks to the reasons why people go into public service in the first place, and the things that keep them going whilst ‘managing the unmanageable’ (as Alexander Stevenson put it). It reflects what many public servants say already drives them — a recent survey by the thinktank Localis put ‘community responsibility’, ‘accountability’ and ‘integrity’ as the top three most important characteristics for the public sector workforce.

Put simply, Ryan’s argument is that the current touchstones of administrative reform — public administration, new public management and new public governance — are ‘necessary but not sufficient’ to embed real changes in service delivery (see diagram below). He argues that “intrinsic motivation really matters — as much as professionalism, accountability and networks”, and argues for an approach to reform that pays much more attention to the values and principles that people bring to their work as civic leaders and professionals as lever for positive change.

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