Justice, Efficiency, and the New Public Management

In this article I aim to explore the link between two normative values, namely justice and efficiency, and the New Public Management approach. In pursuing this task I offer several critical arguments against some of the recent justice‐based objections levied against New Public Management by David Arellano‐Gault. I claim that Arellano‐Gault's account of the relation between justice and the New Public Management is seriously undermined by two conceptual flaws: (1) a conflation of right‐libertarianism, utilitarianism, and desert theories of justice and (2) a conflation of the technical/productive sense of efficiency with the social/distributive sense. Furthermore, I maintain that even when the different theories of justice and the different senses of efficiency are properly delineated, the case for necessarily linking NPM to a particular theory of justice is markedly unconvincing.