Entrepreneurship‐driven public management reforms in Southeast Asia: Critical implications for public accountability
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Author | M. Shamsul Haque |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1889 |
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Entrepreneurship-driven public management reforms in
Southeast Asia: Critical implications for public accountability
M. Shamsul Haque
National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
Correspondence
M. Shamsul Haque, Department of Political
Science, National University of Singapore, 10
Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260,
Singapore.
Email: polhaque@nus.edu.sg
Summary
In recent decades, public management has been restructured worldwide for greater
efficiency and innovation based on entrepreneurship-driven models such as
Reinventing Governance, New Public Management, and post-NPM frameworks. The
primary intent of these business-like models is instilling entrepreneurship,which would
encourage risk-taking innovation, managerial autonomy, performance orientation, and
customer choice. Such entrepreneurial orientation is embedded in organizational-
managerial reforms related to human resource management, budgeting framework,
performance benchmarking, and so on. These entrepreneurship-driven reforms have
significant impacts on administrative structure, procedures, and norms affecting the
process of public sector accountability. In line with such global trends, most countries
in Southeast Asia have embraced some of these pro-market business-type reforms in
public management to enhance its entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition,
which have implications for managerial control, neutrality, regulation, and integrity
required for public accountability. This article explores these entrepreneurship-driven
reforms in the region and evaluates their critical implications for the long-established
institutions, struc tures, and procedures of public accountability.
KEYWORDS
entrepreneurship, public accountability, public management, Southeast Asia
1|INTRODUCTION
Since the early 1980s, there have been unprecedented worldwide
reforms in public management based on market-led neoliberal
assumptions, neo-managerial principles, and theoretical bases like
new institutional economics and public choice theory, which have
been branded as Government Reinvention, New Public Management
(NPM), and Post-NPMs (Chan & Rosenbloom, 2010; Hood, 1991;
OECD, 2005; Therkildsen, 2001). While most of these reforms have
been based on rationales such as efficiency, competition, entrepre-
neurship, and customer choice, it is the question of public sector
entrepreneurship that carries greater significance. The reform move-
ment started with bureaucrat-bashing of the public service for its per-
ceived inertia, inflexibility, and rigidity that allegedly led to its
inefficiency, customer dissatisfaction, and non-competitiveness
(Carroll, 2017; Hood, 1991). The centrality of entrepreneurship can be
seen from one of the most influential reform-driven books, titled
Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming
the Public Sector (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). As Carroll (2017, p. 108)
suggests, “The notion of ‘public entrepreneurship’blossomed with the
Reinventing Government movement of the 1990s, alongside ‘new
public management.’” This priority of entrepreneurship (Carroll,
2017)—which is an integral ingredient of the business sector but
hardly used in public administration (Zerbinati & Souitaris, 2005)—was
also reinforced by another simultaneously published book, titled
Breaking Through Bureaucracy (Barzelay & Armanjani, 1992).
The ten basic precepts of entrepreneurship in Reinventing Govern-
ment—a government which is catalytic, competitive, mission-driven,
results-oriented, customer-driven, enterprising, anticipatory, decentralized,
and market-oriented—are significantly present in NPM prescriptions such
Received: 9 November 2019 Revised: 13 June 2020 Accepted: 15 June 2020
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1889
220 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Public Admin Dev. 2020;40:220–231.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad
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