Abstract
This article begins by reviewing developments in the field of public administration over the past 50 years and identifying factors that have served, in some cases unintentionally, to undermine public confidence in the actual practice of public administration. It then examines a number of important conditions that must be addressed in the preparation of the next generation of public administrators and the professional development of those currently in the field. The most important of these involves the recognition of the centrality of government, and thus public administration as well, for the building of an effective and productive society. Before concluding, a major initiative to encourage enhanced excellence in the education and training of public administrators, which was initiated by the United Nations in conjunction with the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration, is examined.
The past several decades have been both significant and in many ways very difficult ones for the practice of public administration. Stimulated by the emergence of New Public Management, the field of public administration subsequently was highly influenced by the development of the notion of shared or collaborative governance. One consequence of these developments was that beginning in the mid-1980s and early the 1990s, various international organizations and numerous national political movements began to suggest that most countries either had moved, or must move beyond, the era in which government alone shaped and set the ground rules within which societies functioned.
In the 21st century, the world’s nations, both highly economically developed and transitional ones, had now moved into an era in which there would be a new co-equal relationship between the public sector, the private sector and civil society. Collaboratively, all three sectors would shape the legal and institutional framework within which the public sector, and thus public administrators, and society more generally, would function. This would inevitably lead to a better and more productive future. In the article that follows, we shall examine how this world view came to be, how reality dramatically intruded upon this new world view and what some of the implications of all this are for those who teach public administration.
How we got where we were: a brief look at the emergence of public sector disillusionment
Inevitably, the society within which a profession develops helps to shape that profession, just as the profession will help to shape the society in which it emerges (Janowitz, 1966). This has certainly been true for the profession of public administration. As both a field of professional practice, and as an academic discipline, public administration has helped to shape the world in which it functions and, in turn, has been very much shaped by that world. Having begun to emerge as both a profession and an academic discipline in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, the field had begun to achieve widespread acceptance and some measure of prestige by the 1930s and 1940s. It was even more celebrated in the aftermath of World War II. At that time many of those who, prior to the war had taught public administration returned to their universities after having practiced it as government administrators during the course of a war, where their ability to effectively manage people and resources was critical to victory.
In the second half of the 1960s, as political turmoil and social discontent became the norm in many Western democracies, public administration, and the governments that public administrators managed, came under increasing criticism and attack from many sides. From the left, government was seen as promoting oppressive wars and failing in its efforts to end poverty, let alone build great societies. From the perspective of the right, government was seen as rigid, expensive and a tool of those seeking to impose utopian social views on contemporary society. In less highly developed parts of the world, government and the public administrators who managed it were frequently seen as the vehicle through which colonial masters sustained their domination and facilitated the exploitation of the many by the few (Stillman, 2010).
Not surprisingly given these realities, governments, as well as the people managing them, became an increasingly easy target of attacks from both liberal and conservative politicians throughout the final two decades of the 20th century. This growing chorus of criticism, when combined with the social upheaval that marked much of the late 20th century, led to ever more bitter attacks and denunciation of government – ironically, at least in the West, most especially by those seeking to lead it. One consequence of this seeming failure of the liberal state, and the public administrators who managed it, was the emergence of a period of conservative ideological and political ascendency that led many to seek ways to govern societies in such a manner as to minimize what was perceived to be the growing control by, and failure of, government.
In places like Australia and New Zealand, efforts to dramatically downsize government became the order of the day in the 1980s, and similar initiatives quickly spread to many other parts of the world. Suddenly, concerns about unshackling the private sector through deregulation, privatization, downsizing and rightsizing national government, and the decentralization of government became a major part of the international dialogue on the future of the public sector and, consequently, on the discipline of public administration as an area of thought and analysis (Dwivedi and William, 2011). By the end of the decade, New Public Management had emerged as both a set of techniques for and an ideology of public management. 1 Authors became famous by suggesting that the time had come for government to stop “rowing the boat” and begin to think about limiting its activities to “steering” it (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).
It was at about this time that many people concerned about such matters (and especially those associated with international and/or donor organizations) began to focus upon “governance” rather than government. Governance was seen as a more encompassing and comprehensive approach to what government had traditionally been expected to do within a society (Kettl, 2002). Governance was celebrated as an approach to governing because it emphasized the fact that it was not just government alone, but rather the public sector in conjunction with, even guided by, the private sector and civil society that created the total environment within which countries were or could become more or less democratic and/or more or less economically successful.
These developments led to even more attention being paid to the delivery of what traditionally had been governmental services through alternative delivery means. Suddenly, both in the most highly economically developed countries, and transitional societies as well, non-governmental organizations, and even private sector companies, came to be seen as much more effective vehicles for the carrying out of government activities than government itself – both because of their presumed greater efficiency and assumed cheaper costs (Rosenbaum, 2006). Little attention was paid to the fact that as a consequence of these developments, governmental capacity was frequently weakened, and at least in some circumstances, intentionally undermined (Hodge, 2006).
That such a development did occur is, in retrospect, hardly a surprise. Many major political figures of the 1980s – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to cite two very prominent examples – spoke eloquently and fervently about the virtues of the private sector and the greater efficiency and effectiveness that it brought to the delivery of public goods and services. 2 Subsequently, the fall of the Soviet Union – which resulted in a large-scale movement from highly centralized, government-driven economic systems to more decentralized, free-market systems – served to further emphasize the attractiveness of the private sector and the need to reject government bureaucracy. This was occurring during a time in which it appeared that for many countries of the world, significant economic gains were being made — a fact which seemed to further confirm the validity of the key elements of what could be characterized as the era of shared governance and New Public Management.
In transitional countries, very important international organizations – the World Bank, the United Nations, the regional development banks and major international donors like the Swedish International Development Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – while not intentionally seeking to denigrate government as they put great emphasis upon the need to build and strengthen the private sector and civil society, often did so. To reinforce this point, they frequently chose increasingly influential non-governmental organizations rather than government agencies to administer major development projects. Inevitably, the new world was becoming one no longer driven by government, but rather by private sector philosophy and initiatives managed collaboratively by the main three sectors of society (Rosenbaum, 2011). That the shared or collaborative governance approach to governing had won the day was made even more evident by the consequence of the occasional reverses of political fortune of the politically triumphant conservative movement. Bill Clinton, a moderate liberal, won the United States presidency by proclaiming the end of big government 3 and Tony Blair came to power in Britain as a representative, not of the traditional Labor Party, but rather as the leader of “new labor” and a representative of “the third way”. 4
In the capitals of the world’s rich countries, the new era of collaborative governance was reflected in the emergence of what came to be known as Washington Consensus. Clearly, if less wealthy countries wanted to become wealthy, they must turn from being government dependent to being private sector focused. Bureaucracies must be dramatically slimmed down, government regulations must be greatly reduced and/or eliminated and new models of shared or collaborative governance proclaimed. The model of the future, despite its brutal and authoritarian foundation, was most assuredly Chile, where conservative University of Chicago–trained economists minimized government and maximized the private sector. All through the 1990s and well into the first decade of the 21st century, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world, organizations like the World Bank and USAID glorified the Chilean model as an example for both transitional countries and highly developed ones to follow.
The first sign that the new collaborative governance orthodoxy might not be all that was presumed occurred in the aftermath of one of the defining moments of the then new 21st century, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. In a terribly tragic manner, and at a cost of 3,000 lives, it illustrated the colossal failure of relying upon the private sector (the airline industry) to maintain adequate airport security. The fact that no one was held accountable for these failures further illustrated the problems of over reliance upon the private sector for important public services. Faced with grave public concern about the safety of air travel, and industry concern about its very future existence, many countries, led by the United States, undertook a significant reassessment of their airport safety practices, and in the face of major public outcries and political criticism of prior (private sector) practices, country after country turned to the public sector to ensure airline safety. In the United States, the Transportation Safety Agency, which rapidly became the largest US government agency to be established since the end of World War II, was created.
The concluding years of the past decade served once again to call attention even more dramatically to the very real limitations of shared governance, with its emphasis on the unshackling of the private sector. The worldwide economic crisis, which was no less a governmental crisis, raised even more profound questions about the basic premises of unleashing the private sector through policies of deregulation and emphasis on the notion of shared governance. First, the deregulation of the housing, banking and financial services sectors almost brought down the entire world economy and certainly facilitated the worst economic crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. Second, the relatively successful response of the most severely affected country, the United States, served to illustrate in a very powerful way the seeming hypocrisy of what it and most other developed countries had been preaching for the past two decades. Contrary to basic Washington Consensus principles, not only did the U.S. dramatically increase government expenditures, but it also increased the size of its national government.
The significant expansion of government activity within the U.S. in response to the financial crisis proved to be very effective as a means to moderate the economic disaster brought on by its under-regulated, unshackled private sector. Even more significantly, the country that acted the quickest, and with, relatively speaking, the most significant governmental fiscal stimulus response, China, was that one which suffered the least downturn in its economy. Further illustrating the significant limitation of societal over-reliance upon the private sector were the very considerable difficulties faced by many of the most prominent private sector corporations of both Europe and the United States. Several of these organizations, which for many years had rigorously argued and lobbied for greater deregulation and freedom from government oversight, were forced to turn to government funding and support in order to survive. Thus, the events of the past several years have served to discredit the most basic premises of the shared governance era. The private sector clearly does not represent a role model for, or an alternative to, government as regards the shaping and guiding of contemporary society.
Where do we go now?
Some realities of the post-crisis era
That four decades of attack on the public sector, as well as parallel efforts to glorify and magnify the role of the private sector at the expense of the public sector, have taken their toll on both the functioning of government and those who work in and manage it, is an understatement. Moreover, attacks on the public sector and public managers continue to be significant in the U.S., with, as a consequence, issues of compensation and pensions for public employees becoming topics of much political controversy. In Europe similar issues, as well as the actual maintaining of civil service systems, are increasingly topics of political controversy in one country or another (Suwaj, 2013). Nevertheless, the public problems that countries all across the world face continue to grow and the situation regarding their solution becomes ever more complex.
The consequence of these realities is highly significant for those involved in public administration education and training. The demands and the needs of contemporary society grow all the time. The tools and technologies with which public administrators need to work become ever more complex. Nevertheless, in some critical respects the task facing those involved in the education of the next generation of public administrators (and those involved in the training or re-training of the current generation) is a good deal more fundamental than simply the teaching of new techniques and the learning of new approaches to service delivery (Dugget, 2003). More critical is the recognition of some very basic realities of the overall political and governmental context within which public administrators of necessity must work.
One significant consequence of the developments of the past four decades is that it has been frequently forgotten that strong and effective government – which public administrators manage and lead – is the single most important and the one indispensable institution of any modern society. There are at least three reasons why this has been so and will undoubtedly continue to be the case.
First, it is government, and only government, that is given the authority to legitimately utilize force to maintain the rules of order in modern society. Consequently, it is government, and again only government, that possesses the legitimate right to take away one’s property, one’s liberty and, in some countries, one’s life. These are awesome powers that are not legitimately the province of any other societal institution. This, alone, sets government apart from all other societal institutions and also is why, despite its centrality to the creation of a good society, holding it fully accountable at all times is also a critical condition for societal well-being.
Second, it is government that sets the rules for virtually every other institution of society and thus it plays an absolutely essential role as the necessary pre-condition and/or enabler of these institutions – whether they are commercial, non-profit, religious or social. When government plays this role effectively, then society is likely to prosper and to develop in very positive ways. When it does not play this role effectively, as we have seen in terms of the failure of financial sector regulation in many Western democracies over the course of the past dozen years, the possibilities for personal and institutional corruption, greed, and taking great risks with society’s resources can lead to economic and social disaster.
Finally, and this is often not recognized, it is in most instances the public sector, the government, which is the source of much of the important change and innovation in modern society. The United States represents a very interesting and highly significant case in this regard. Most of the new innovations that have transformed not only American society but all of the developed world, and much of the transitional world, have been the product of research and development either carried out by government employees or directed and guided through government-initiated contractual relationships with nonprofit or private sector entities. The internet, geographic information systems, hydraulic fracturing (which has almost overnight changed the worldwide balance of power in terms of energy resources), the medicines that have played a major role in combatting AIDS and other epidemic-like health concerns have all been significantly shaped by, or are the direct result of, important government initiatives. Similarly, much of the technology that has made the owners of Apple and Google multi-billionaires is the product of U.S. government research (Mazzucato, 2013; Wolf, 2013).
Taken together these three realities – the awesome authority granted to government; its crucial role as the source of enabling support for the other major institutions of society; and its ability to produce or facilitate major change and innovation in society – serve to ensure that government is the one irreplaceable and indispensable institution of modern society. Consequently, the role of those responsible for operating, managing and sustaining government, namely public administrators, is in fact as important a role as there is in modern society. Unfortunately, the prevailing anti-government attitudes of the past four decades have obscured this powerful and fundamental reality and, in so doing, have helped to undermine the actual effectiveness of government by both discouraging talented individuals from pursuing the profession of public administration and disillusioning those who currently are public administrators. Thus, the very first task of public administration education and training is to educate both those entering the field or already involved in it, as well as the public more generally, that this is the one activity that is absolutely central to the future well-being of the nation and society more generally.
The 20th century witnessed at least two major eras of democratization, with the result being that, between 1950 and 2000, the number of governments around the world that could be characterized as reasonably democratic doubled from about 50 to 100. However, the process of democratization is neither a simple nor a straightforward one. Nor is it assessed by tallying up institutional rearrangements at two different points in time and doing a mechanistic assessment of changes in them. The reality is that democracy is inevitably and will always be a work in progress. There will be steps forward, as well as backward, in every democratic country.
Equally importantly, democracy is not only a work in progress, but it is a far more fragile condition than is often recognized. This fragility is significantly enhanced by the fact that democratic governance is never simple, and often not very pretty, and sometimes not very effective. As Winston Churchill is supposed to have once commented about democracy in the United States, the U.S. government will always come up with the appropriate solution to any problem after it has tried all other alternatives and they have failed miserably. Whether this statement is true or apocryphal, it is nevertheless often a rather accurate one.
Public administrators, as individuals committed to promoting good governance, have a special responsibility to be both the protectors of and the advocates for sustaining and enhancing the democratic character of the countries in which they work. As individuals who have been trained to reflect the highest standards of governmental administration, they bear a very large burden in terms of providing in a fair, effective and responsive way, the high quality, and fully transparent, public services that individual citizens seek from their government. In so doing, they support and significantly enhance democratic governance. However, this burden and responsibility is made more difficult by the fact that so many citizens, constantly bombarded and influenced by those attacking government as a means of advancing their own interests, find themselves frustrated and disillusioned with their governments.
Today’s public administrators are being asked to take on tasks and solve problems that public administrators of the past have never had to deal with and, without question, this will be even more so in the future. Whether one is talking about efforts to lift people out of poverty, to enhance and preserve a clean environment, to address issues of global warming or to maintain an effective full employment economy, today’s citizens expect government to address and solve problems that are far more difficult and complex than any with which it as previously had to deal. None of these are problems that will be quickly, easily or neatly solved. Nevertheless, we do expect our public administrators to solve them. Both a nation’s citizens and its public administrators need to be educated in a manner that enables them to both recognize and effectively cope with the reality of the complexity of the issues that we are asking government to solve.
Much progress has been made in addressing issues of poverty. However, much of that progress has occurred in only one country, China, and at a time when inequality there has been growing greatly (Orlik and Davis, 2012). Thus, in many other places, much remains to be done. In 2001 the United Nations’ World Public Sector Report: Globalization and the State noted that eradicating poverty and ensuring sustainable development should form the raison d’etre of public administration. Half the world lives on less than U.S. two dollars a day while the richest twenty percent of the world population receive more that eighty per cent of the global income. It was further noted by the UN in that report that 2 billion of the world’s people lack clean water, while 800 million people were seriously affected by hunger. Due to inadequate medical care, 500,000 mothers died each year while giving birth to children (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2001). The situation has not changed significantly from the way it was a decade or so ago.
While issues of eradicating poverty remain significant problems in many parts of the world, this situation has been further complicated by the very significant growth in inequality that has taken place in many parts of the world over the past three decades. The United States, which saw a decline in inequality from 1950 to 1980, has seen a dramatic rise in inequality since 1980. Similarly, while China has gone a long way to lessening poverty, it has seen huge rises in inequality that have led to increasing social disorder. In Europe, both Western and Central and Eastern, inequality has been rising very significantly (Bandeji and Mahutga, 2010). Not only does this represent a concern in terms of social stability in these societies, but as recent research has demonstrated, it has begun to represent a major economic issue, especially in countries still seeking to recover from the financial crisis of a half dozen years ago.
Much of the underlying logic of the philosophies that have dominated thinking about public administration over the course of the past half century has focused on the importance of efficiency as one of the principal goals of public administration. The reality is that in a democratic society there always will continue to be significantly more important objectives for contemporary government. Issues that have been noted above, such as addressing poverty and inequality, sustaining democratic values and the like, sometimes require implementation in such as a manner as to place great emphasis on participation and inclusion at the cost of efficiency. This will always be the order of things in a democratic society.
During the past several decades, many countries have reflected a variety of centrifugal tendencies, leading to, in some extreme cases, the actual disintegration of the state. From Canada, to Great Britain, to the Balkans, to much of Africa, and even to China – there are numerous signs that the nation-state itself is much weaker, more prone to disintegration and generally a much more vulnerable institution than at any time in the past 100 years. In even the most stable democracies, government has been downsized and right-sized in such a manner as to greatly lessen its capacity to address pressing social and economic issues. In some instances, one has witnessed the actual disintegration of the nation-state in such a manner as to produce chaos and destroy governability. In other less dramatic instances, these developments have served to open civic space for the emergence of a variety of non-governmental, civil society organizations that serve to fill some of the vacated governance space. The non-governmental status of such organizations, however, further complicates the issue of providing a reasonable framework of accountability, performance standards, ethics and professionalism for the governments in communities where they work.
During the course of the past few decades, almost every country has seen the emergence of various cultural, ethnic or linguistic issues, with the resulting increase in demands for the direct representation of disparate cultural and ethnic interests and heritages in the processes of public administration and governance. This, in turn, has stimulated even greater demands for the widespread recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity in both the political and economic spheres. Such developments inevitably create tension regarding a variety of issues revolving around matters of non-partisanship and professionalism. At least in part, this is because the routine ways of, and procedures for, doing things in traditional, ethnically based organizations may differ significantly from those of other types of organizations.
Increasingly, at the same time that one witnesses some disintegration of the capacity of the nation-state in many parts of the world, one has also witnessed the integration of individual nation-states into large international economic cooperation and free trading bodies with common rules and regulations and, even, in the case of Europe, a common currency used by a majority of the nations of the European Union. 5 This, in turn, has been accompanied by the development of increasingly permeable national borders and the growth of more multi-national institutions and regulations – both of which complicate even further issues of nation-state governance, personal professionalism and the maintenance of uniform governmental standards (Acharya and Johnston, 2007). In addition to giving rise to new courses in various academic programs, these developments have had other unanticipated consequences for public administration education and training. For example, France’s National School of Administration, which has a long history of developing that country’s leading governmental figures, recently found itself admitting its first German citizen to an entering class.
The UN/IASIA task force on standards of excellence
These realities of the post-crisis era make it clear that the demands on the next generation of public administrators will be great and the demands on those who train them will be even greater. The events of the past few years have called attention to the need to strengthen all aspects of public administration education and training that can help to prepare this new generation of public administrators. In fact, however, many leaders in the field of public administration education and training had already begun to recognize the need to further build and enhance the education and training programs that will be needed to prepare the next generation of public administrators for the extraordinary tasks they will face.
One such response to this growing awareness was initiated by the Division of Public Administration and Development Management of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DPADM). Following many requests for assistance from public administration education and training institutions throughout the world, UN/DPADM initiated conversations with the leadership of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) about how best to address such matters. After extended discussions, it was jointly agreed to establish a Task Force on Standards of Excellence for Public Administration Education and Training. In July of 2005, task force members were jointly appointed by Guido Bertucci, the then-Director of UN/DPADM, and the late Turgay Ergun, the then-President of IASIA. The author, a past president of IASIA, was asked to chair the task force, whose fourteen members came from all regions of the world and included, among others, Poland’s Minister of Higher Education and the heads of major public administration education and training institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The task force completed its deliberations and issued a report which was accepted by UN/DPADM and by IASIA in 2009 (Task Force, 2008). That report included eight Standards of Excellence, offered many specific criteria by which one might assess an institution’s progress towards achieving the Standards of Excellence, and ended with a checklist that individual institutions could utilize in working with these standards. In its introduction to the Standards Report, the task force noted its belief that excellence in public administration education and training would facilitate the highest quality of public sector performance through providing the highest quality of public servants. The task force also noted its belief that the purpose of public administration education and training is to provide public administrators with the competencies and capacities to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life, especially for the most economically, socially and politically disadvantaged members of society.It then enumerated its eight Standards of Excellence:
Following the completion of the work of the task force, the UN undertook a variety of initiatives to both publicize and encourage the utilization of the standards. This has included organizing workshops on the standards and their use in Kampala, Uganda; Rome, Italy; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Warsaw, Poland and Bali, Indonesia. The UN has also promoted the standards by making the report of the task force available in six languages through the United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) and focusing upon them at other UN sponsored and organized conferences.
Over the past few years, individual institutions have made use of the Standards of Excellence as a tool to carry out their own institutional development and self-assessment activities. The School of Public Administration of the University of Pretoria, South Africa used the standards for its own self-assessment and has encouraged their use throughout the country. The National Institute of Public Administration of Finland drew upon the Standards of Excellence in their efforts to help the governments of Namibia and Tanzania to establish national training organizations in their countries. The Chinese Academy of Governance has utilized the Standards of Excellence as the centerpiece of several conferences involving the leadership of public administration education and training institutions from throughout China and Asia more generally. Encouraged by this extensive utilization of the Standards of Excellence Report, and after three years of deliberation, the leadership of IASIA is currently initiating a worldwide system for the accreditation of public administration education and training programs based on the standards.
Conclusion
As was noted at the outset, the past several decades have been difficult and demanding ones for those involved in the management of government. New and very complex challenges have continued to emerge at a rapid rate. Both the public, as well as political leaders, have expected government, and those who administer it, to meet those challenges. Nevertheless, at the very same time, political leaders have become ever more vociferous in their criticisms of those who manage government and often, whether intended or not, have helped to undermine the very legitimacy of the institutions they either lead or are seeking to lead. Taken together these conditions have made the past several decades very turbulent ones not only for those who manage government, but also for those who are involved in the education of public administrators.
Congruent with the growth in attacks on government, initiatives were undertaken to greatly expand the role of the private and the non-governmental sectors in addressing public problems. Indeed, in more than a few instances, critics of government suggested that the private sector should serve as a model for the public sector since it was clearly the more efficient and the more effective part of society. However, events of the past dozen years should and to some extent have served to both lessen the allure of private sector approaches and to remind one that the role of the public sector has always been and remains absolutely critical to the well-being of society. Not surprisingly, all of this has given rise to various efforts to rethink and improve the quality of public administration education and training throughout the world.
In this article, some of the most critical challenges that must be taken into account in the education and training of both current public administrators and the next generation of individuals to whom society will look to manage government have been examined. Some of these are new issues, others of them are problems with which public administrators have grappled for many years. In terms of the broader context of building an excellent program in the area of public administration education and training, proposals put forward by a UN-initiated task force have been presented. It is clear that whether responding to new challenges, old ones or the more general task of building an excellent program, the demands have been, are and will be significant. Nevertheless, given the absolute centrality of public administration to the well-being of society, it is essential that those involved in the education and training of public administrators continue to explore ways to provide the highest quality of educational opportunity.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.