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AT THE start of the 21st century, two related but distinct shifts in public administration arose as critiques of New Public Management (NPM): Robert B Denhardt and Janet V Denhardt’s support for a New Public Service (NPS) and Gerry Stoker’s development of Public Value Management (PVM) for networked governance. Denhardt and Denhardt argue that public administration should focus on democratic citizenship, community and the public interest, while Stoker redefines managerial roles around generating public value within networks of actors.

Denhardt and Denhardt present the NPS explicitly as a normative alternative to NPM’s market-driven managerialism. Instead of viewing citizens mainly as ‘customers’ and public managers as entrepreneurs who ‘steer,’ the NPS redefines civil servants as democratic stewards who serve citizens, encourage civic engagement, and pursue the public interest.

The NPS is based on principles often summarised as: serve citizens, not customers; pursue the public interest; prioritise citizenship and public service over entrepreneurship; think strategically and act democratically; recognise that accountability is more complex than markets and hierarchies suggest; serve rather than steer; and value people over productivity. Importantly, NPS emphasises deliberation, legitimacy, equity and democratic values.

Stoker discusses a related issue: the growth of complex policy networks where multiple public, private and third-sector actors work together to produce public outcomes. He contends that a managerial approach focused only on efficiency and market signals is insufficient for networked governance. Instead, public managers should aim for public value, the outcomes and standards that citizens collectively prioritise by convening, deliberating, and coordinating within networks.

Bangladesh’s modest development, dense urbanisation, and rising citizen expectations make the NPS call to treat citizens as participants rather than customers especially relevant. If public agencies adopt NPS principles, they can reframe service delivery as a civic partnership: mobilising community inputs in designing health, education and local infrastructure services, and making accountability reciprocal rather than hierarchical.

Stoker’s networked governance concept fits Bangladesh’s mixed provision environment, where NGOs, private providers, local government bodies and national agencies all have roles. Civil servants, who build networks, clarify roles and pursue shared public-value goals, can coordinate more effective responses in areas such as disaster management, slum upgrading or primary health outreach.

NPS’s focus on deliberation and public reasoning can help address perceptions of exclusion and enhance legitimacy. Practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen juries at the municipal level and systematic stakeholder facilitation in policy design can boost the perceived fairness and responsiveness of government actions.

NPM-era performance incentives, centralised bureaucratic traditions and patronage dynamics can oppose NPS-style civic orientation. Civil servants rewarded for strict rule-following, speed or revenue targets may find deliberative, time-consuming citizen engagement unappealing or unrewarded. Translating NPS requires realigning incentives and promotion criteria to value facilitation, collaboration and ethical service.

Stoker’s network model assumes actors have some level of capacity and reciprocity. In many Bangladeshi contexts, local governments or community organisations often lack bargaining power, reliable information or administrative skills, which make their networks vulnerable to being controlled by better-resourced actors such as private contractors, national agencies or development partners. This situation can distort public-value outcomes unless the state invests in capacity-building and fair governance rules.

NPS’s broader view of accountability beyond markets and hierarchical oversight calls for multiple accountability mechanisms — political, legal and social. Bangladesh’s accountability system has formal anti-corruption agencies and electoral processes, but informal politics and complex patronage networks make establishing effective plural accountability challenging. Therefore, policy should combine institutional reforms (transparency, ombuds institutions) with civic empowerment efforts.

Practical recommendations for policymakers on adopting NPS and PVM include the following:

Civil service curricula and in-service training should teach skills like deliberation, facilitation, conflict mediation and civic engagement; performance appraisal should acknowledge collaborative achievements and public-value results.

When creating public-private community networks, they require inclusive decision-making rules, capacity-building for weaker partners and transparent reporting. The use of formal memoranda of understanding that define shared public-value goals, metrics and dispute-resolution procedures is necessary.

Municipal governments can serve as testbeds for NPS practices, participatory budgeting, citizen complaint redress boards, and neighbourhood planning councils, thereby building local legitimacy and facilitating learning for scale.

Supplement traditional audits with citizen scorecards, independent ombudsman offices and public deliberative forums that assess both outputs and the fairness of services, aligning with NPS’s broader accountability perspective. E-governance tools can expand access and transparency, but must be designed to support, not replace, deliberative and inclusive engagement.

The NPS and PVM together provide both the normative reason and the practical management logic for rethinking public administration. NPS offers the democratic ‘why’ to serve citizens and strengthen civic life, while PVM offers the ‘how’ to handle complexity by creating public value through networks and institutions.

The key insight is that meaningful reform needs both an ethical shift and an institutional overhaul. Civic-minded public servants will struggle without networks built for fairness and incentives aligned with creating public value collaboratively.

Implementation requires recalibrating incentive structures, investing in capacity (especially at local levels), and establishing multiple accountability mechanisms that safeguard the public interest in multi-actor governance. If policymakers take the NPS commitment to democratic citizenship seriously and combine it with PVM for networked governance, Bangladesh can advance towards a public administration that not only provides services efficiently but also enhances the democratic ties between the state and society.

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Dr Nasim Ahmed holds a PhD in public policy from Ulster University in the UK and currently working as associate professor of public policy at the Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (affiliated with the University of Dhaka).