Excerpt from: THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AROUND THE WORLDThe Minnowbrook Perspective(Published Jan 2011)
I argue strongly that it is now time to once again critically rethink the field of public administration. This time it is not only about relevance to social issues—linking theory to practice, the focus of the Minnowbrook I Conference— but also about making the field truly relevant to public administration experiences around the world.Public administration theories should be built from cases with different contexts. International academics should be the core group to lead the field. And the target audience should be practitioners from around the globe. I envision the field of public administration twenty years from now as a global field that is taught in every country and that offers much greater choice in international textbooks, journals, and conferences.
The field has been dominated by the U.S. experience for the past hundred years. Theories of public administration have been built on the U.S. experience , for a U.S. audience, by U.S.-based academics. This one-way influence of the United States’ public administration establishment has led to domination by particular mindsets in the past thirty years, such as the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. We can only go in a new direction of global public administration by accepting that U.S.-based public administration is a subfield of public administration. The field needs to take a much broader global perspective in all areas of teaching, research, and service to the public.
WHERE WE ARE NOWUpon graduation from university in the United States, I returned to Thailand to teach. In my course I had students read what I was taught, such as materials on politics and administration dichotomy, bureaucracy, accountability, governance, and ethics. But I soon realized the inadequacy of my knowledge about Asia’s context in public administration. In one class, a midcareer student stood up to say, “Why are we learning all of these theories? These are all thoughts from the United States. They don’t make sense in the Thai context.”
GLOBALIZATION The problem was that I was not presenting my students with theories from other parts of the world. I had not included topics relevant to Thailand, such as decentralization, corruption, and development. After this, I tried to develop cases in the Thai context. However, although the cases now focused on the local context, the theories were still from the U.S. experience.
Currently, I am teaching in Singapore, where a cohort of about seventy students in the master of public administration (MPA) program represents at least twenty countries. Because there is no one dominant nationality, there is no one national context on which I am obliged to base the design of my course. Midcareer students, who come from different national settings, would not be able to relate to some debates common in the United States. For example, in China the separation between the Communist Party and the bureaucracy is not a topic of great concern, in Myanmar issues of collaboration and contracting-out make little sense under the military regime, and in Papua New Guinea the issue of total quality management might be of little use. And the list could go on.
Many academics rely on examples of course syllabi available on the internet and existing online textbooks to form course syllabi. This reliance, coupled with the long history of public administration as a field in the United States, has created an eschewed list of options available for scholars. The spread of the NPM in syllabi and courses around the world in the new millennium is a prime example. The NPM movement, which is grounded in economics , a rational approach, neoliberalism, capitalism, and market-based decision making, began with practitioners in the United States and Anglo-Saxon countries and is used in academic texts throughout the world. Most MPA courses in countries like China and Thailand would include the study of the NPM.4 And now, moreover, although the NPM movement has faded in the original countries, alarmingly many countries around the world are just about to begin their great NPM experiment. This time lag in how U.S.-based theories are transferred to practice elsewhere usually runs ten to fifteen years.
Most public administration and public policy schools have an economics orientation that focuses on the rational approach and quantitative methods, and is problem-solving oriented and aligned with the NPM movement. Not many focus on understanding problems,critical approaches, or discourse-based approaches. However,more recent debates in the field of public administration would include the perspectives of post modernism, feminist theories of public administration, social discourses and public administration,interpretative approaches, critical theory, network theory, and so on. Managerial practices have shifted to collaborative governance,networking, and building a consensus through discourse. This will probably be the next phase in public administration. In this phase one must know the development of social sciences and be able to comprehend perspectives outside the rational,positivist,and scientific approaches of public administration.
New schools of public policy and public administration are rapidly being opened around the world. For example, more than a hundred MPA programs have started in China in the last ten years. Also, many prestigious public administration or public affairs master's programs,such as Syracuse University's Maxwell School and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, have applicants with more diverse backgrounds from all around the world. many programs outside the United States are also increasingly becoming much more international. They are more international in terms of the student body,faculty members,and direction of research. However,the textbooks and case studies that are non-US based are not being produced fast enough to meet these emerging demands. This stems from the historical developments of the field, as explained above,together with the character of academic journals and conferences,which are predominantly for US audiences.
WHERE WE SHOULD BE:I envision the textbooks and journals of public administration in the near future as becoming highly international.We should focus on non-US based cases and theories and print more textbooks,in English, that make sense in different regions of the world,whether in Africa,Latin America,the Middle East,or Asia.These textbooks should be theoretically focused,with ample empirical studies of cases from a diverse set of contexts. Comparative work is no longer a subfield but must be mainstream public administration.For example,a student who would like to learn about public motivation theory should be able to find at least one book with studies that cut across many countries.And same principle can be applied to any other midlevel theories.
It is important to emphasize that I do not mean to enhance comparative public administration as a subfield of public administration.Instead I propose making U.S public administration a subfield replacing it with global public administration. All along, comparative public administration was seen as a subfield, because it was conceived from U.S dominated public administration perspective. This new view of the field of public administration in global perspective would have great ramifications. For example,no longer would Woodrow Wilson's paper be given so much importance, and the first textbooks and public administration would no longer be those produced in the United States in the early 1900s. The intellectual history of public administration would be taught in a global context. This would force academics to consider more historical perspectives, such as administration in different civilizations in the past and administrative practices in different political,cultural,social, and economic contexts in the present.
HOW WE GET THERE:To realize this new view of public administration as a global field, there would need to be major changes in the ways we teach to research. In our teaching we would need to give importance to both local and non local students. We have an obligation to provide diverse knowledge that does not rely on one context. We must be able to provide examples and thoughtful insights into different contexts for different theories. We must avoid scenarios where international students come to study public administration in our institutions and then feel taht they cannot apply the knowledge elsewhere. We must also train our doctoral to be multilingual academics who interested in different administrative systems and are comfortable doing international research.As for research, as a community we must foster international channels of information dissemination. Journals and conferences must be designed to answer to the international public administration community. Currently,some high ranking journals are becoming more internationally oriented, but not most. many universities use rankings of journals to judge the quality of publications of their faculty members. Because many of these journals are dominated by a preference for U.S based cases,currently it is much more difficult for cases from other countries to be accepted. For example, for a study of emergency management, the case of Hurricane Katrina is easily accepted,but the cases of Nargis in Myanmar or the tsunami in Aceh,Indonesia, will not be seen as regional or comparative studies - even though, as a matter of fact, the emergency management of Nargis and the tsunami are probably more relevant to the rest of the world than Hurrican Katrina.Hopefully, in the new global public administration,as international academic journals became ranked more highly,this would in turn force us to focus more on international research agendas, because these journals would only accept studies relevant to the global community that include cross-national cases. Similarly,international conferences would be the norm rather than the exception.Local or regional conferences would still exist but would be considered less prestigious than international ones, which would be much more vibrant.These ideas are difficult to implement for scholars with large domestic audience. For example,the United States has a large domestic market,which enables U.S based scholars to produce scholarly work only for the domestic market. Thus,if you are teaching human resources management to students who you know will work for the county or city where your university is based, then it would make no sense to teach the practice of other countries. You would also try to write articles that are directly linked to a practitioner audience in the area. Though this approach has value because it keeps the academician connected to the area-specific audience,it does not enhance the field as a whole. The same example can be given with scholars working in other large countries. For example,if you are a public administration specialist in Vietnam,Zambia,Hungary,Brazil,or any other country,if you only focus your research and ideas based on what is happening in this one country,you will miss the whole worldwide discourse on public administration. Your theories and cases,though of interest to your local group practitioners, might not be contributing in any way to theories in the field,because what you have written might be unique to that particular country and others might have already written extensively on the same subject.We need to better value international journals and conferences. The themes of journals and conferences should focus on theory rather than on a particular country.We can incorporate into our academic incentive systems new ways to rank publication in journals or conference attendances for tenure and promotion criteria. By doing so,more leading academics in the field would be able to function as international scholars continuously producing globally relevant knowledge. We would be agents of knowledge transfer responsible for what we teach and how it applies globally. We would be comfortable managing research projects that cross geopolitical boundaries. We would be creating knowledge that is relevant to local audiences and at the same time connected to discourses on a global scale. We would be able to produce more diverse textbooks that would be useful around the world.Only as it does these things will the field of public administration continue to be relevant.
CONCLUSION:I am waiting for that day to come when my midcarrer MPA students are able to read and discuss cases from their own countries,are able to debate the development of the field in China versus the United States versus India, and are provided with a variety of ways to think about public administration other than U.S based approaches. This will be the day when I will never be asked again why me must study only certain histories and certain approaches,because I will then have many choices of texts to provide my students. This will be the day when the field of public administration will have become a coherent global field that has answers and can guide public administration students and practitioners in al political,social,economic,and cultural contexts.And this will be the day when we will have moved beyond the domination of specific country contexts and will have created a truly global public administration.
Excerpt from: THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AROUND THE WORLDThe Minnowbrook Perspective(Published Jan 2011)
Title: A Personal Memo from a Woman Teaching Public Administration in Asia - ORA-ORN POOCHAROEN
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Published :2017-03-21T23:27:00-07:00
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A Personal Memo from a Woman Teaching Public Administration in Asia - ORA-ORN POOCHAROEN
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