The New Public Management

The New Public Management is a subject of strong interest to Latin American scholars, as demonstrated by their participation in CLAD-UNESCO’s distance learning course on the subject, conducted through the Internet from September 1999 to June 2000. I was given the responsibility to direct the course from my “virtual professorial chair ” (Catedra Virtual). This experience, occurring alongside my ordinary teaching duties at the LSE, confirmed that the literature on the New Public Management does not teach itself. Indeed, the literature as a whole borders on being inaccessible to anyone new to the subject, including trained scholars. This paper responds to this problem, as well as to an invitation to speak on “The New Public Management in Latin America ” at the annual CLAD (Latin American Center for Administration and Development) Congress, to be held in Santo Domingo in