Compiled by Jake Love Soper in support of doctoral research at UCL. Organised around the intellectual architecture of the Impact Framework argument — from NPM's foundational assumptions through the STS tradition, to mission-driven government and the decolonial critique.
Hood (1991) · A Public Management for All Seasons? Public Administration
The founding analytical text of NPM as a concept — each of its core doctrines embeds a theory of knowledge.
Hood & Dixon (2015) · A Government That Worked Better and Cost Less? OUP
The most rigorous empirical assessment of NPM — government neither worked better nor cost less over three decades of reform.
Niskanen (1971) · Bureaucracy and Representative Government
The public choice model that produced agentification and the structural separation of policy from delivery.
Jasanoff (2004) · States of Knowledge Routledge
The foundational text for the co-production thesis: scientific knowledge and social order are mutually constitutive.
Jasanoff & Kim (2015) · Dreamscapes of Modernity Chicago UP
Develops sociotechnical imaginaries — the shared world that shapes what problems are visible and what solutions are thinkable.
Foucault (1991) · Governmentality in The Foucault Effect
Power and knowledge are inseparable — power produces knowledge forms that reproduce the power relations that generated them.
Northcote & Trevelyan (1854) · Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service
The earliest institutional expression of the epistemological hierarchy NPM would later intensify.
Barber (2007) · Instruction to Deliver Politico's
The practitioner bible of the NPM hierarchy in its most fully developed form — the global export of deliverology.
HM Treasury (2022) · The Green Book
ROAMEF in mandatory operational form — forms of knowledge that cannot survive this translation are systematically filtered out.
Mazzucato (2021) · Mission Economy Allen Lane
The defining treatment of mission-driven government — missions fail through institutional architectures incompatible with mission work.
Rittel & Webber (1973) · Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning
Wicked problems require diverse perspectives, genuine participation, iterative approaches — the forms of knowledge NPM excludes.
UK COVID-19 Inquiry (2024, 2025) · Module 1 & 2 Reports
The sequential SPD model cannot operate at the speed complex crises demand.
Pielke (2007) · The Honest Broker Cambridge UP
The typology — Pure Scientist, Science Arbiter, Issue Advocate, Honest Broker — maps onto KTD's understanding/belief relationship.
Collins & Evans (2007) · Rethinking Expertise Chicago UP
Distinguishes interactional from contributory expertise — NPM's credentialling cannot recognise frontline knowledge.
Gluckman (2014, 2016) · The Art of Science Advice to Government
Knowledge brokerage — iterative, diplomatic, collaborative — as the practical operationalisation of KTD's Knowledge-Data relationship.
Lipsky (1980) · Street-Level Bureaucracy
Frontline workers are the de facto makers of policy, not its implementers — NPM's targets attempted to override their discretion.
Pressman & Wildavsky (1973) · Implementation California UP
The foundational demonstration that treating delivery as epistemologically subordinate to policy design fails.
Mulgan (2005, 2025) · Next Generation Public Institutions
Shared data and shared knowledge as pre-conditions for cross-cutting problem-solving — a direct echo of KTD's Data and Knowledge layers.
Quijano (2000) · Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America
SPD's ranking of abstract knowledge above situated knowledge is an expression of the coloniality of knowledge.
Santos (2014) · Epistemologies of the South Routledge
Epistemicide reframes the know-do gap as a structural exclusion of frontline and experiential knowledge.
Scott (1998) · Seeing Like a State Yale UP
The state creates categories through which measurement is possible, destroying the local complexities that resist it.
Rosanvallon (2011) · Democratic Legitimacy Princeton UP
Distinguishes impartiality, reflexivity and proximity — NPM maximises impartiality at the expense of the other two.
Williams (2002, 2005) · Truth and Truthfulness
Sincerity and accuracy as the two virtues of truth — essential to the civil servant's role as belief navigator.
Dewey (1927/1954) · The Public and Its Problems
A mission constitutes the public that recognises a problem as shared — data visible only to technocrats undermines that process.