A Study On New Public Management In Local Government Of Ghana

Ghana local government has undergone several dynamic changes during the course of the 1980s. As an agent of the central government, it has been challenged to endure greater demand for quality social services despite the budgetary constraints as well as meeting requirements of stringent donor loans and grants conditions. In addition, recent public sector management reforms around the world have been underpinned by the New Public Management move. Eventually, Ghana's political struggle and its development of the basic principles of public administration coincided with the era of the NPM ideology. Thus, NPM has left certain footprints on Ghana's civil service reforms. The NPM principles have changed our way of thinking about public administration and we can not go back to the unchanged situation where we started from.The NPM approach provides a good framework for thorough analyses of the reasons and motives of most public sector reform ideas. Widely known is the framework of Peters (2001) who grouped the features of transformation in government organizations as follows: marketisation, participation, flexibility, performance management, and deregulation. While this approach gives a good indication of the major trends and prevailing thinking in public administration, this paper also draws on it while analyzing the changes and reform ideas in Ghana local government. The selective adoption of components of the NPM package is commonplace among countries since the purpose is to curb administrative lapses which varies from country to country. In accordance, the Ghana local government has both consciously and unconsciously bowed to the NPM move to maintain the quality and quantity of public services delivery by applying business-like principles to governance (Borins, 1995), adopting market mechanisms (Walsh, 1995), and utilizing alternative service delivery (Glover & Burton ,1998).