Assembling New Public Management: Actors, networks and projects

In this chapter we adopt the analytic of ‘assemblage’ (Anderson & McFarlane 2011) to document how New Public Management (NPM) has been mobilised and recontextualised within different nation states over time through the unique combination of discrete yet tangled and globally diffuse political movements and configurations. To make sense of these issues empirically, we trace multiple iterations of NPM within five countries: Argentina, Australia, England, Italy, and Spain. We focus our attention on the intermediating actors, networks and projects that have crystalised to produce different possibilities for the emergence of NPM within these countries and reflect on their comparable yet uneven development as dynamic expressions of governance assemblages.