Eakin, Lemos
6 min
This paper investigates the tension between New Public Management (NPM)—a global administrative philosophy emphasizing efficiency, privatization, and market-like competition—and the governance requirements for climate change adaptation. While governments increasingly adopt NPM to streamline services, the authors argue that these reforms often undermine the very institutional capacities needed to address the long-term, complex, and uncertain challenges posed by climate change.
The researchers conducted a comparative analysis of two distinct case studies: the housing sector in Norway and flood-risk management in the Upper Lerma Valley, Mexico. By examining how NPM-inspired reforms (such as the devolution of responsibilities to the private sector and the focus on 'client' satisfaction) affected these sectors, the authors evaluated changes in technical capacity, institutional memory, and accountability. They assessed whether these administrative shifts improved or constrained the ability of these systems to adapt to climate-related stressors.
The study reveals that NPM reforms often lead to a 'hollowing out' of public sector expertise. In Norway, the shift of building control from municipal authorities to private companies resulted in a loss of locally adapted construction knowledge, as national firms prioritized standardized designs over site-specific climate resilience. In Mexico, the decentralization of water management to municipal and quasi-private entities failed to account for the watershed-scale nature of flood risks, leading to fragmented, ad-hoc responses that often bypassed democratic accountability in favor of patronage-based interventions.
Ultimately, the authors conclude that while NPM may improve operational efficiency in routine tasks, it is poorly suited for the complex, multi-scalar governance required for climate adaptation. The success of such reforms assumes the existence of robust institutional frameworks and accountability systems that are often absent, particularly in developing contexts.
As governments worldwide continue to reform their public sectors, this research highlights a critical blind spot: administrative efficiency is not synonymous with adaptive capacity. Policymakers must recognize that climate adaptation requires long-term, integrated, and accountable governance structures that cannot be reduced to simple market-based metrics or short-term cost-cutting measures.
Although many governments are assuming the responsibility of initiating adaptation policy in relation to climate change, the compatibility of "governance-for-adaptation" with the current paradigms of public administration has generally been overlooked. Over the last several decades, countries around the globe have embraced variants of the philosophy of administration broadly called "New Public Management" (NPM) in an effort to improve administrative efficiencies and the provision of public services. Using evidence from a case study of reforms in the building sector in Norway, and a case study of water and flood risk management in central Mexico, we analyze the implications of the adoption of the tenets of NPM for adaptive capacity. Our cases illustrate that some of the key attributes associated with governance for adaptation--namely, technical and financial capacities; institutional memory, learning and knowledge; and participation and accountability--have been eroded by NPM reforms. Despite improvements in specific operational tasks of the public sector in each case, we show that the success of NPM reforms presumes the existence of core elements of governance that have often been found lacking, including solid institutional frameworks and accountability. Our analysis illustrates the importance of considering both longer-term adaptive capacities and short-term efficiency goals in public sector administration reform.
Alex: [nodding] So the efficiency gains are real, but they're being purchased at the cost of adaptive capacity.
Sam: [confirming] That's the authors' framing, yes. And the Mexican flood risk case makes this concrete. When federal technical capacity was devolved to municipal water operators, those operators inherited responsibility without inheriting the data systems, the modeling expertise, or the authority to act across jurisdictions. Facing complex hydrological risk, they defaulted to reactive, short-term fixes—because that's what their institutional position allowed. The expertise that could have supported anticipatory action had been dispersed through reform.
Alex: [analytical] And that's the hollowing-out effect. The state looks functional until you stress-test it. [[RP_SECTION:post-npm-governance-frameworks|Post-NPM Governance Frameworks]]
Sam: [steady] Precisely. And this is where the paper moves from diagnosis to prescription. The authors argue for what they call post-NPM frameworks—a shift away from transactional governance toward a whole-of-government approach that explicitly treats resilience as a performance indicator, not just cost-efficiency. The idea is to rebuild cross-scalar coordination capacity: entities with mandates for long-term anticipatory action, where technical expertise is embedded institutionally rather than contracted out to consultants who lack the contextual knowledge to use it well.
Alex: [skeptical but engaged] How do you operationalize that without just adding bureaucratic overhead?
Sam: [deliberate] That's the right question to push on, and the paper doesn't fully resolve it. The core requirement is a shift in accountability structures—away from siloed output metrics and toward shared responsibility for systemic outcomes. That means maintaining institutions that can model risk across scales, that have the authority to coordinate horizontally, and that are evaluated on long-term stability rather than short-term throughput. Whether that's achievable within existing legal and political frameworks varies considerably by context.
Alex: [reflective] Which brings us to the obvious limitation. [[RP_SECTION:diagnostic-framework-limitations|Diagnostic Framework Limitations]]
Sam: [measured] Yes. The authors are working from two qualitative case studies. The comparative design is useful for identifying structural patterns, but it limits how far you can generalize the causal claims across different political economies. Institutional culture in Norway and Mexico differs substantially from, say, a lower-income country with weaker civil society or a federal system with different intergovernmental dynamics. The structural problem they identify may be widespread, but the path toward post-NPM governance is going to be path-dependent in ways this paper can't fully map.
Alex: [grounded] So the finding is less a universal prescription and more a diagnostic framework—here's the failure mode, now figure out what it looks like in your context.
Sam: [confirming, calm] That's a fair read. The paper's contribution is identifying the mechanism: NPM reforms create a structural mismatch between the governance tools we've built and the governance demands that climate change imposes. Efficiency and resilience aren't inherently incompatible, but optimizing for one while ignoring the other has costs that only become visible when the system is actually stressed. The argument is that we need to stop treating public governance as a service delivery problem and start treating it as a long-term capacity maintenance problem.
Alex: [measured] A distinction that's easy to miss until something goes wrong. Thanks for walking through the mechanism—this is the kind of structural critique that tends to get lost in the policy debate. Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.