Concerns with New Public Management’s narrow focus generated a countermovement to place substantive political values more firmly at the center of the governance debate.

New Public Governance (NPG) emphasizes the importance of taking a collaborative approach with partners within and across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors in providing public services.

This movement emphasizes three trust and legitimacy building characteristics of public governance that are ignored and undervalued by NPM. First, NPG is value-centered; it argues that the goal of government is to promote the larger common good.

A second characteristic of NPG is that it emphasizes the importance of creating government processes that facilitate the generation of implementable agreements among wide-ranging stakeholders who may disagree on what courses of action will produce the maximum public value.

A final characteristic of the NPG movement is that it views the creation of the public good as a coproduction process involving the public, private market, and the nonprofit sectors.

New Public Governance is more emergent and bridges aspects of the nonprofit sector with aspects of the market model.