A Realist Perspective on AI-era Public Management*

TLDR

Recent years have seen new ideas such as Digital Era Governance, Public Value Management, and New Public Governance that emphasize partnerships, performance governance, and citizen engagement, and AI—an emerging digital technology—has attracted significant interest for its potential impact, with reports already documenting successful public sector deployments. This realist review investigates the mechanisms across post‑NPM, organisational, individual, and innovation contexts that are linked to positive outcomes from AI initiatives in the public sector. The study examines how AI initiatives are applied within post‑NPM agendas and identifies the contextual mechanisms that drive their effectiveness. The findings offer empirical evidence on the conditions that enable AI‑based solutions to achieve positive outcomes in post‑NPM settings and guide where to target such initiatives.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a number of significant ideas and approaches to addressing the shortcomings of the New Public Management paradigm. Three of these recent ideas, which include Digital Era Governance, Public Value Management, and New Public Governance, emphasise partnerships collaboration and engagement of citizens; performance governance and innovation and recognize the transformational potentials of digital technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the digital technologies attracting the greatest interest in public administration in terms of its potential impact. There are already a number of reports on how AI is being deployed in the public sector with good outcomes. By employing a realist review approach, this study investigates the specific mechanisms across post-NPM, organisational, individual and innovation contexts which are associated with positive outcomes from AI initiatives in the public sector. The study further examined the specific applications of AI initiatives within Post-NPM agendas. Our findings provide some empirical evidence for a better understanding of the conditions and where to target AI-based solutions in post-NPM context for positive outcomes.