New Public Management in Bangladesh: Implementation Challenges and Ways Forward

New Public Management (NPM) is currently a global trend that is dominating all governments' reform agendas. Bangladesh is not an outlier. This paper begins by defining NPM and then moves on to examine critical preconditions for successful NPM implementation. Following that, this research revealed significant roadblocks in Bangladesh's implementation of modern public management. The final section of the study focuses on the next steps in implementing modern public management in Bangladesh and concludes with a final comment on the overall concept.

Final Comment

The final chapter deals with the metaphor expressed in the book’s subtitle, in order to consider what type of judge is best prepared to face and overcome the paradox of the relation between principles and rules in each concrete case: Judge Hercules or Judge Hydra? The answer will ultimately be the following: neither of them, but instead Judge Iolaus. Based on this metaphor, the paradox of constitutional principles and constitutional rules is presented as a special case of the paradox of justice in terms of systems theory: the paradoxical relationship between closure and consistency of legal system and its openness and adequacy to society. Rules relate primarily to the closure and consistency of law and principles concern primarily its openness and adequacy to society. While the former are associated predominately to the formal argumentation, the latter are linked first and foremost to the substantive argumentation. In this way, the ideas of ‘a single right answer’ and of optimizing balancing are rejected head on, and the precariousness of legal rationality is affirmed.

Charles Richet. A Nobel Prize Winning Scientist’s Exploration of Psychic Phenomena by Carlos S. Alvarado

Carlos S. Alvarado is a well-known specialist of the history of parapsychology, and also famous for his pedagogical skills mostly as an affiliate of the Parapsychology Foundation and the Alvarado and Zingrone Institute for Research and Education. Most of the material used in this book was already available online on his blog (https://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com) as it is a collection of previously published essays. I’m part of the people who publicly endorsed the book because Alvarado is clearly one of the most qualified authors able to deal with this topic, but here I will provide a complementary expertise based on my reading of the book and my own work on the history of French parapsychology (Evrard, 2016). (I’m also contributed to the Appendix E “Bibliography about and by Charles Richet with emphasis on psychic phenomena”, 119-132). Charles Richet (1850-1935) is a French physiologist (Nobel laureate 1913) who had contributed to many fields, among them psychology and psychical research. The book gathers six essays while trying to exhaustively cover these specific contributions through various glasses: a general overview of his interest in psychic phenomena (Chap. 1, 1-26), a discussion of his metapsychic autobiography (Chap. 2, 27-44), an analysis of his early ideas on mental suggestion and his pioneering use of probabilities in human sciences (Chap. 3, 45-54), his various attempts to create gateways between psychology and psychical research (Chap. 4, 55-66), a review of his masterpiece The traité de métapsychique (Chap. 5, 67-84), and a final comment about his own conclusions about what he learnt from psychical research and the survivalist hypothesis (Chap. 6, 85-96). The first four appendices cover small historical points as Richet’s séances with famous medium Leonara Piper (97-102), one of his observation of moving ectoplasm (103-104), a note about the term “ectoplasm” which he didn’t coin (105-106), and an extract from his Traité (107-118) about the scientific statute of “metapsychics”, his own term for parapsychology, in which we have a nice illustration of his clever and Hugolian expression style.