Translations of New Public Management: A decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

The influence of New Public Management (NPM) on public sector organisation is nowhere more evident or pervasive than in the field of school governance where political actors, school leaders and governors are called upon to make the internal operation of the school more transparent and accountable to others through the explicitness of performance indicators and output measurements. Yet despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of NPM that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule in the context of changing political-administrative structures. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir 2010), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices. The result is a nuanced account of the complex terrain on which NPM is grafted onto and translated to reflect inherited institutional landscapes and political settlements and dilemmas.