The New Public Service (NPS) approach emerged as a critical response to the perceived limitations and democratic deficits of New Public Management (NPM), positioning itself as an improvement by shifting the primary focus from market-driven efficiency to citizen-centric governance and the creation of public value.

New Public Management (NPM), prominent from the 1980s, advocated for applying private sector management techniques to the public sector. Its core tenets included efficiency, economy, effectiveness, market orientation, competition, decentralization, performance management, and treating citizens as 'customers.' While NPM introduced significant reforms and achieved improvements in some areas, it faced substantial criticism for:

• Undermining public values: Its strong emphasis on market mechanisms and efficiency often neglected crucial public values such as equity, fairness, accountability, and democratic participation.
• Fragmenting services: Decentralization and extensive contracting out sometimes led to a fragmented service delivery landscape, making it difficult for citizens to navigate and access comprehensive services.
• Treating citizens as customers: This perspective reduced citizens to passive consumers, overlooking their fundamental roles as active participants, rights-holders, and co-producers of public value.
• Ethical concerns: A singular focus on targets and performance metrics occasionally led to 'gaming' the system or neglecting complex issues that were not easily quantifiable.

New Public Service (NPS), articulated by scholars like Denhardt and Denhardt, offers an alternative paradigm. It argues that public administration's primary role is to serve citizens, not customers, and to collectively create public value. NPS emphasizes:

• Serving citizens, not customers: Recognizing citizens as rights-holders and co-creators of public value, with a strong focus on democratic participation and civic engagement.
• Seeking the public interest: Moving beyond individual preferences to collectively defined public interests and shared values, fostering a sense of community.
• Valuing citizenship and public service: Re-emphasizing the ethical and moral dimensions of public service and the importance of public servants as stewards of the public trust.
• Thinking strategically, acting democratically: Integrating democratic values into policy and administration, fostering collaboration and partnerships across sectors.
• Accountability is not simple: Acknowledging that accountability is complex and multi-faceted, extending beyond mere performance metrics to include ethical, legal, and democratic dimensions.

In essence, NPS represents an improvement because it attempts to re-embed public administration within a robust democratic framework, prioritizing public values, citizen participation, and the ethical responsibilities of public servants. While NPM focused on 'how to steer' (efficiency), NPS asks 'what is the public purpose' and 'how to serve.' It offers a more holistic and normative vision for public administration, directly addressing the democratic deficit and ethical concerns raised by an overly market-driven approach.