Managing public services

Abstract

The shifting perceptions of public management - from concepts of public administration to those of business management - originated in the market ideology, style and public expenditure objectives of the Thatcher administration, and is a trend that has been globalized. This was as a result of the continuos decline of Britain's economic performance that reached its lows in the 1970's. Almost all countries in the world faced with a declining public sector performance now follow the British lead in privatizing their public sector. Other bold attempts to improve the reach and effectiveness of the public sector have been experimented. Such include importing and adapting techniques from the private sector into the public institutions considered as a move strong enough to revitalize the public sector to make it survive to carry out its important tasks. In Kenya, the deterioration of the public services over the years calls for reengineering of the public' sector management. The need for applying private sector strategies to the public sector operations such as education, health, water, electricity, and information management e.t.c cannot be over-emphasized. There is therefore need to explore the experience of both the developed and developing countries on the evolution of the public services management over time. Kenya has been in a continuous engagement to privatize its public institutions in an effort to change the management of public sector. This privatisation process has been slow due to political and technical hitches. From the onset, Kenya was deficient in manpower resources to implement the privatisation programme. This combined with strong political interference (politicians have used the opportunity to take full ownership of some institutions in an irregular fashion) have resulted in stalled privatisation processes. This paper is an attempt to fill the information gap on whether the public services can be managed as in the private sector to achieve the desired level of efficiency. And if that is the case, can private driven systems deliver a system of equity and universal access, which are key principles of the public sector systems? To answer these pertinent questions, the paper begins with an assessment of the conceptual framework of public management as a discipline, and the constraints of the public sector environments that may influence the success of recent policy initiatives to revitalize the sector. This paper study tries to find out whether the private sector management strategies can be adopted in the management of public services, establish whether the adoption of private sector management strategies will lead to improvements in the management of the public services to achieve efficiency and high productivity.