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Public Administration in the 21st Century:
From Dead Governments to Live Communities
Robert David STEELE Vivas
References
Admin, “Goals, Demand, and Challenges of 21st Century Public Administration in Tanzania,” Economic Challenge ( posted 5 June 2011.
This is a marvelously concise and still complete overview of public administration. Here is the final paragraph: “Administration today and the government can no longer shoulder that responsibility alone. Social and human development needs have become complex and diverse and to address these complex and diverse needs some form of cooperative effort is required. Various players need to be brought into the public service delivery process to be able to contribute effectively to social and human development needs.”
Argyriades, Demetrios, O. P. Dwivedi, and Joseph G. Jabbra (eds.), Public Administration in Transition: A Fifty-Year Trajectory Worldwide – Essays in Honor of Gerald E. Caiden (Vallentine Mitchell, 2007)
An able edited and integrated collection of essays with strong international and ethical foundations. Starting from a Eurocentric perspective seeking to foster democracy and rule of law, public administration evolved to including foreign development administration and capacity building. A major setback occurred with the privatization movement led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, while paradoxically also witnessing a dramatic expansion of government in many new directions striving to deal with complex challenges, ultimately producing “administrative states” in which the government rules the people rather than serving them. Corruption is a constant theme, not only in lesser developed countries and failed states, but in the US and Europe as well, where the erosion of public service and a dramatic decline in public trust have come to the fore since the start of the 21st Century. While concluding that public administration is vital and that it must be characterized by integrity and authenticity, the authors do not address the proliferation of organizations that seek to govern alongside or instead of governments, nor do they address the information and intelligence (decision-support) implications of global challenges that no government can address in isolation or in the absence of shared intelligence with integrity.
Bourgon, Jocelyne, A New Systhesis of Public Administration: serving in the 21st Century (McGill Queens University Press, 2011)
“In an increasingly interconnected environment, shocks, crises, cascading failures, and surprising breakthroughs are features of our age. The ability to anticipate, intervene, innovate, and adapt is now seen as essential for governments. Public officials serve in an expanded public space that is being reshaped by the rise of social networking and modern information and communication technologies. The desired results on many public issues exceed the reach and resources of government. A New Synthesis of Public Administration sets out a theoretical framework that takes this new reality into account. It reveals how government forms part of a co-evolving system between people and society, where public results are a shared responsibility and citizens are respected as important creators of public value.”
Brudney, Jeffrey L. and J. Michael Martinez, “Teaching Administrative ethics in nonprofit Management: Recommendations to Improve Degrees, Certificates, and Concentration Programs,” Journal of Public Affairs Educations 16(20: 181-206.
Surveys institutions of higher learning that offer degrees in non-profit management, and within those, identify offered, optional, and required courses in ethics. Discusses the five principal approaches to administrative ethics, in descending order: case studies, professional codes of ethics, guest speakers, great thinkers, and well-known secondary sources.
Cheema, G. Shabbir and Dennis A. Rondinelli (eds), Decentralizing Governance: Emerging Concepts and Practices (Brookings Institution Press, 2007).
“The trend toward greater decentralization of governance activities, now accepted as commonplace in the West, has become a worldwide movement. Today s world demands flexibility, adaptability, and the autonomy to bring those qualities to bear. In this thought-provoking book, the first in a new series on Innovations in Governance, experts in government and public management trace the evolution and performance of decentralization concepts, from the transfer of authority within government to the sharing of power, authority, and responsibilities among broader governance institutions.”
Crompton, Linda C., “The New Future of [Non-Profit] Governance,” Transformative Governance.org, reprinted from the November/December 2009 edition of Board Member, Volume 18, Issue 6.
Noteworthy for summarizing changes that make business as usual impossible, and for stating that “no single board is able to deal with the complexity and scale of the problems now faced by the nonprofit sector.” Cites David Renz* to the effect that “the future is no longer ‘the networked organization,’ but rather ‘the organization as network.’” *”Reframing Governance,” The Nonprofit Quarterly, Winter 2006.
Derluguian, Georgi and Craig Calhoun (eds.), The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges After Neoliberalism (New York University Press, 2011)
“The nation state has been at the institutional heart of the last 200 years as it defined our economic and political lives. It is, however, an insufficient platform from which to face the challenges of the 21st Century. This volume unravels a complex web of connections around the current financial and economic crisis. Among its revelations are: the difficulty of a renewed Keynesian solution because of the gridlock of weak national and transnational institutions with inadequate authority and oversight; the irony that cap-and-trade solutions to environmental issues rely on the same bankers and traders at the core of the financial crisis; and the maneuvers of offshore capitalism in evading state regulation by instant electronic financial transfers under flags of convenience. This work peels back the skin of a rather sinister global beast.”
Jain, R. B., Public Administration in India: 21st Century Challenges for Good Governance (Deep & Deep Publications, 2002)
An excellent summary of the book is available online. India is perhaps the most complex nation-state on the planet, with more languages, religions, and other diversity attributes than any other. The author observes that “Governments can no longer afford to support rigid, bureaucratic, reactive, rules driven administration organizations—rather
Martinez, J. Michael, Public Administration Ethics for the 21st Century (Praeger, 2009)
The engineering, medical, and legal professions in the United States each have explicit codes of ethics in which all practitioners must be educated and by which they must abide. Yet of all fields, public administration remains without such a uniform code—despite the manifestly ethical nature of the way civil servants and non-profit administrators are asked to work and make decisions. The author explains five principal approaches to administrative ethics: case studies, professional codes of ethics, guest speakers, great thinkers, and well-known secondary sources.
Panyarachun, Anand, et al, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (United Nations, 2004).
“Today, more than ever before, a threat to one is a threat to all. Threats to international peace and security go far beyond aggression by States and include poverty, deadly infectious disease, environmental degradation, civil war, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and transnational organized crime. This report by 16 of the world’s most experienced leaders, commissioned by the United Nations Secretary-General, puts forward a bold new vision of collective security that stresses the need for effective, equitable action in preventing and responding to all major threats to international peace and security.”
The book lists and prioritizes, for the first time, the top ten transnational threats to all humanity that no government can address in isolation. They are: 01 Poverty; 02 Infectious Disease; 03 Environmental Degradation; 04 Inter-State Conflict; 05 Civil War; 06 Genocide; 07 Other Atrocities; 08 Proliferation; 09 Terrorism; 10 Transnational Crime. Read full review.
Pittman, James E., 21st Century Issues in America: An Introduction to Public Administration Theory and Practice (AuthorHouse, 2009)
Today, in the 21st Century, more than ever before, we are in urgent need of local, state, national and global citizens who possess policy and administration competence, who are committed to the achievement of worldwide public administration, social justice, and human and economic equity as a foundation for public policy and development, and lasting peace on the planet. The goal is to create a framework and deep learning knowledge that will enable them to understand and make sense out of a complex and challenging social and economic issues that asks productive citizens to comprehend and deal fairly and openly with controversial topics as prejudice, racism, economic and social justice, cultural differences and pluralism, the recession, the economy, ill advised wars, inappropriate dress codes, crime and violence drugs, financial crises, and natural disasters.
Ray, Donald I., Tim Quinlan, Keshav Sharma, Tachita A. O. Clark (eds.), Reinventing African Chieftaincy in the Age of AIDS, Gender, Governance, and Development (University of Calgary Press, 2011).
This collection of essays examines the relatively new, and frequently overlooked, political phenomenon in post-colonial Africa of chieftaincy “re-inventing” itself. The traditional authority of chiefs has been one of Africa’s missing voices who are now bringing new resources to the challenges that AIDS, gender, governance, and development pose to the peoples of Africa. This publication presents new research in Ghana, Botswana and South Africa, providing the broadest geographic African coverage on the topic of African chieftaincy. The nineteen authors, many of them emerging scholars from Africa, are all members of the Traditional Authority Applied Research Network (TAARN). Their essays give critical insight into the transformation processes of chieftaincy from the end of the colonial/apartheid periods to the present. They also examine the realities of male and female traditional leaders in re-inventing their legitimacy and their political offices in the age of great social and political unrest, health issues and governance and development challenges.
Reinicke, Wolfgang, Global Public Policy: Governing Without Government? (Brookings Institution Press, 1998)
Wolfgang Reinicke, recently named to be the inaugural dean for the school of public policy at the Central European University funded by George Soros, provides an in-depth analysis of economic globalization and examines its implications for public policy. National responses, as suggested on both ends of the political spectrum in the United States and elsewhere, are often flawed. Global public policy -- not world government, but a mixed approach to global management in which states, corporations, NGOs, regional and international organizations, and coalitions cooperate -- provides an alternative and promising framework. Read full review with concerns.
Reinicke, Wolfgang and Francis Deng (eds), Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance (IDRC Books, 2000)
The new global environment requires new approaches, new ideas and innovative tools to address new challenges in areas as different as weapons control, climate change, genetic engineering, and labor standards. Critical Choices looks at one such tool: global public policy networks. In these networks, governments, international organizations, the corporate sector and civil society join together to achieve what none can accomplish on its own. The authors explore both the promises and the limitations of this new form of global cooperation. They discuss how such networks might contribute to better manage the risks and make use of the opportunities that globalization presents. Finally, they offer provocative advice and solid recommendations on how the United Nations can foster such networks.
Renz, David, “Reframing governance,” Philanthropy Journal, 2 January 2007 9summary excerpt of article by the same title in The Non-Profit Quarterly, Winter 2006)
“In settings where nonprofits are working to tackle complex and entrenched community issues, the individual nonprofit will be the unit from which services are delivered, but that delivery is planned, organized, resourced and coordinated – in other words, governed – through a web of overarching and integrating relationships. . . . Governance at this higher level is integrated by a core evolving ideology, and the ability to influence that ideology becomes critical to the sustainability and actualization of the mission of the individual organization. Thus, even the concept of the “networked organization” falls short: Our future is more about the “network as organization,” networks being systems of organized -- but not hierarchical -- influence and engagement that link multiple constituent entities to work on matters of overarching importance and concern. In these new systems of governance, which operate much like social movements, a board has less strategic “room” to move and make choices; it remains vital through the effective exercise of influence in the network.”
Rischard, Jean-Francois, HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them (Basic Books, 2003)
“Rischard finds their common thread: we don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems that our increasingly crowded, interconnected world creates. Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past.Rischard proposes new vehicles for global problem-solving that are startling and persuasive.”
The author breaks the 20 issues into 3 groups. Group one (sharing our planet) includes global warming; biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, and maritime safety and pollution. Group two (sharing our humanity) includes massive step-up in the fight against poverty, peacekeeping-conflict prevention-combatting terrorism, education for all, global infectuous diseases, digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation. Group three (sharing our rule book) includes reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade-investment-competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, and international labor and migration rules. The author's core concept for dealing with these complex issues intelligently, while recognizing that "world government" is not an option, lies with his appreciation of the Internet and how global issues networks could be created that would be a vertical complement to the existing horizontal elements of each national government. Read full review.
Sampson, Gary, The WTO and Global Governance: Future Directions (United Nations University Press, 2009)
“The World Trade Organization (WTO) is mandated by governments to pursue full employment, a steady growth in real income, and higher standards of living for its 150-plus member countries. Its role is also to ensure the optimal use of the world's resources in accordance with sustainable development. As a result, the WTO has greatly extended its reach into nontraditional areas of trade policy, even though it is only part of a more global structure of international agreements with overlapping objectives and commitments. These commitments serve to shape domestic policy choices and constitute a principal feature of global governance. The WTO has a principal role to play in determining the borderline between domestic policy choices and international commitments. While the extended reach of the WTO is lauded by some as one of the greatest achievements in international cooperation, others see it as anathema and an encroachment on national sovereignty. What should be the role of the WTO in global governance? This book contains a variety of views.”
Schiavo-Campo, S. and P.S.A. Sundaram, To Serve and to Preserve: Improving Public Administration in a Competitive World (Asian Development Bank, 2000).
The first chapter, 77 pages in length, is free online: “Public Administration in the 21st Century,” and is a masterful overview of public administration attributes including the four E’s, the fourth only recently recognized as essential: Economy, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Equity.
Robert Steele, 16 July 2011