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NEW PUBLIC SERVICE APPROACH, Many different scholars and practitioners have contributed to the study of New Public Service and are often in disagreement with one another. Yet, it is important to note that there are general ideas which characterize this approach as a normative model, distinguishing it from others. Denhardt and Denhardt (2007) also assert that in the changing scenario, there is a need to evolve the concept of New Public Service. The New Public Service has emerged both in theory and in innovative and advanced practices in the emerging post New Public Management (NPM) changes. The New Public Service can lay claim to an impressive intellectual heritage, including, in public administration, the work of Dwight Waldo (1948), and in political theory, the work of Sheldon Wolin (1960). Unlike the old public administration whose primary theoretical and epistemological foundations was political theory and social and political commentary augmented by naïve social science, and on the other hand, the new public management grounded on economic theory and based on positivist science, the New Public Service has democratic theory, and varied approaches to knowledge including positive, interpretive, critical and postmodern as its theoretical and epistemological foundation. Yet, the more contemporary precursors of the New Public Service include, (1) theories of democratic citizenship; (2) models of community and civil society, and (3) organizational humanism and discourse theory. Let us briefly elaborate on these:, “Democratic Citizenship” focuses on the rights and obligations of citizens as defined by the legal system. Citizenship which is a legal status is concerned with the individual’s capacity to influence the political system. The state and the relationship of citizens to the state should be based simply on the idea of self-interest. Government exists to ensure that citizens can make proper choices for their self-interest by guaranteeing certain procedures and individual rights. For citizens of the state, they look beyond their self-interest to the larger scope which is the public interest. To encourage the public spirit, “justice” is emerged to evoke strong emotions in those who feel mistreated or exploited, and their resistance can often become quite forceful. “Participation” attempts to promote the public spirit, especially for those who are involved in decisions to implement., “Deliberation” provides a common ground of information so that people can start from the beginning together, and builds a sense of solidarity and commitment to solutions that may be proposed. In a case of “Models of Community and Civil Society,” a sense of community might be derived from many different levels of human association from neighborhood to the work group, or might provide a helpful mediating structure between the individual and society. Community is based on caring, trust, and teamwork, bound together by a strong and effective system communications and conflict resolutions., “Organisational Humanism and Discourse Theory” is yet another immediate source of the evolution of the New Public Service approach. As a response to the limitations of the traditional hierarchical bureaucratic and positivist approaches, scholars engaged themselves in search of alternative approaches to management and organization. There emerged a consensus among these scholars on the need of an enhanced public participation. Hence the New Public Service emphasizes on enhanced public dialogue to reinvigorate the public bureaucracy and restore a sense of legitimacy to the field of public administration., The New Public Service suggests a few thrust areas for the emergent public administration. These thrust areas include:, Serve, rather than steer: According to the New Public Service approach, an increasingly important role of the public servants is to help citizens articulate and meet their shared interests, rather than to attempt to control or steer society in new directions., The public interest is the aim, not the by-product: New Public service approach contends that the public administrators must contribute to building a collective, shared notion of the public interest. Hence, unlike in the old public administration and the New Public Management, the goal of the New Public Service approach is not to find quick solutions driven by individual choices. Rather, it is the creation of shared interests and shared responsibilities. The public servant will take the role in creating arenas in which citizens, through discourse, can articulate shared values and develop a collective sense of the public interest., Think strategically, act democratically: According to the New Public Service approach, policies and programmes meeting public needs can be most effectively and responsibly achieved through collective efforts and collaborative processes., Serve citizens, not customers. The New Public Service Approach is of the view that the public interest results from a dialogue about shared values, rather than the aggregation of individual self interests. Therefore, public servants do not merely respond to the demands of “customers”, but focus on building relationships of trust and collaboration with and among citizens., Accountability is not simple: According to the New Public Service approach, the idea of accountability is a complex phenomenon. Hence, the public servants should be attentive to more than the market; they should also attend to statutory and constitutional law, community values, political norms, professional standards, and citizen interests. The New Public Service recognizes that the public administrators are involved in complex value conflicts in situations of conflicting and overlapping norms. It accepts these realities and speaks to how public administrators can and should serve citizens in this context. New Public Service approach demands that, in such contexts, the public administrators not make decisions alone, but through the process of dialogue, citizen empowerment and engagement., Value people, not just productivity: The New Public Service approach argues that public organizations and the networks in which they participate are likely to succeed in the long run if they are operated through processes of collaboration and shared leadership based on respect for all people. Hence, in its approach to management and organization, the New Public Service emphasizes the importance of ‘managing through people’. Systems of productivity improvement, process reengineering, and performance measurements are seen as important tools in designing management systems. But the New Public Service suggests that such rational attempts to control human behaviour are likely to fail in the long run, if, at the same time, insufficient attention is paid to the values and interests of individual members of an organization., Value citizenship and public service above entrepreneurship: The New Public Service approach holds that the public interest is better advanced by public servants and citizens committed to making meaningful contributions to society rather than by entrepreneurial managers acting as if public money were their own. In the New Public Service, there is an explicit recognition that public administrators are not the business owners of their agencies and programmes, because, as King and Stivers (1998) contend, government is owned by the citizens., From a theoretical perspective, the New Public Service offers an important and viable alternative to the traditional public administration as well as the New Public Management Model. It is an alternative that has been built on the basis of theoretical explorations and practical innovations in public administration. The New Public Service, in terms of normative models, clearly seems most consistent with the basic foundations of democracy. The New Public Service seems to provide us a framework within which the valuable values and techniques of both old public administration and New Public management might be played out. The New Public service approach provides a rallying point around which we might envision a public service based on and fully integrated with citizen discourse and the public interest.