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ch Centre, University of Tasmania. Contact: or Innovation in Public Management: the role and function of munity knowledge Michael Hess and David Adams Abstract The New Public Management (NPM) revolution is being challenged by ideas and practices (re)establishing a focus on social factors in public administration. This paper presents some Australian experience of the move to balance the market instruments of NPM by bringing munity oriented instruments and munity based knowledge upon which these depend into public policy and management. Key Words: innovation, munity, locality, knowledge, public management In the daytoday world of public management there always has been and there remains a contest over the types of knowledge that are relevant to decision making. For example the NPM focus of the past 20 years essentially privileged expertise from market sources as the dominant knowledge source. This was reflected in almost all aspects of the public sector from recruitment focus (towards managers and accountants and economists), through the types of strategies deemed relevant to address problems (user choice/user pays), to the instruments of implementation and service delivery (contracts and petitive tendering). Such ideas and instruments achieved normative status under NPM and, despite their relatively narrow knowledge base, were applied across the board to areas as varied as economic, social and environmental policy. The ideas and practice of the NPM produced increased efficiency and during the period of their dominance overall increases in productivity ?externalities? were significant. New forms of disadvantage arose, however, and many discourses were excluded from the policy and management arena. In this article we concentrate on the exclusion and revival of ideas and practices from munity knowledge. This knowledge is reemerging not just in the public administration literature but also in economics? ?cluster theory? (Porter, 2021。 the significance of history and narratives。ade of consultation rather than genuine munity engagement (Public Policy Forum, 1997。 work relations and a recognition of interdependence between the worlds of social, economic, natural and human capital. These changes are not sweeping away the NPM nor are they likely to. Instead they are being grafted onto the NPM ideas and instruments. A straightforward example of this grafting is seen in the shift from contracts to Public Private Partnerships where the shell of NPM is seen in the use of the contract but the elements of social value may also be factored in. While these ideas and practices now entering public management lack the unity of previous waves of reform and do not, for instance, have a single catchy title to reflect a coherent dogma, they are having a profound impact on the practice of government. Our argument for regarding this, tentatively at least, as a fundamental change is twofold. First the underpinning concepts, which are legitimizing the changes, are so different from those they are superseding. The implication of this is that the current changes go beyond incremental reform. They involve the establishment of a new set of meanings in public sector activity and the way in which it fits into society. This ontological cha