A Virtuous Circle of Public Administration Reform? Korean NPM Reforms and the Role of Social Capital

This article surveys almost twenty years of previous attempts to implement new public management (NPM) in South Korea. It finds that NPM, an innovative approach to public administration that emphasizes marketization, decentralization, and changing incentive structures to deliver more efficient services, has had a mixed record in Korea because of resistance by the country’s strong developmental state. This has contributed to a looming governance crisis. How is reform possible? Is Korea doomed to go through yet another cycle of ineffectual presidential-led reforms? Can we find a more sustainable approach? This paper develops a novel theoretical argument that social capital, often overlooked in practice, is actually the prerequisite for successful NPM-style reforms. In turn, this suggests that NPM and New Governance, a rival model of public administration that emphasizes participatory networks, are more convergent than commonly believed. Far from being dead, NPM is as essential as ever. The paper concludes that emerging social, economic and political trends in South Korea are making it possible, if not necessary, to implement NPM from the bottom-up.