- Title
- Competition versus relationship: youth services seen from new public management or ecological perspectives
- Creator
- Krogh, Chris
- Relation
- Journal of Applied Youth Studies Vol. 2, Issue 5, p. 70-82
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- In the youth services field, moves to the market-oriented, competition-based policies of New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG) have impacted on service funding, service delivery, working with other services and accounting for value. Under these models, services are purchased, organisations are producers of social outcomes and service users are rational and self-interested consumers, and evaluations focus on quantifiable effects, often measured in cost/benefit terms. While recognised as being central to the youth services field, relationships between services are expected, but undermined, through the processes of NPM and NPG. An alternative to these quantification and financeoriented rationales is to take an ecological approach that sees services as inextricable from the relationships in which they are enmeshed. These relationships are integral to service achievements and service identities. Evaluation strategies that support story-telling are more effective in allowing the significance of these relationships to be heard. This paper aims to demonstrate that ecological perspectives can help to re-view the service landscape in valuable ways and help to make visible important elements that go unnoticed when competitive and market-based approaches are used. Two key findings from a recent evaluation process presented here illustrate how the ecological experience of services might be recognised, and implications of this for service development and evaluation are briefly discussed.
- Subject
- youth services; ecological perspectives; New Public Governance; New Public Management; evaluation; Indigenous youth
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1405048
- Identifier
- uon:35432
- Identifier
- ISSN:2204-9193
- Language
- eng
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