Posts Tagged Public Administration
Global public policy, partnership, and the case of the World Commission on Dams.
Recent articles and reflections in Public Administration Review illustrate the struggle to understand the place of public administration, its relevance, and its practice in a rapidly changing, globalized world. Chester Newland (2000) argues that this challenge encompasses three interrelated notions: facilitation of collective actions by public institutions, public-values-oriented social self-governance (where individuals and communities organize to express and pursue their collective values and priorities), and reliance on the disciplines of market systems. All this occurs in a context of complex understandings and the implications of globalization–complete with interdependence, process, and ideological perspectives (Farazmand 1999), and exacerbating global trends–economic and financial, technological, environmental, and sociopolitical (Brinkerhoff and Coston 1999)–which create both new opportunities and new challenges.
Globalization has led to closer integration among the countries of the world, increasing their recognition of the challenges and implications that cross national borders and demand cross-border solutions, and continuing efforts to refine the processes for establishing global public policy. At the same time, citizens are increasingly coming together and organizing to represent their own interests, express their views, and undertake actions to assist themselves and others, either independent of, in conflict with, or in partnership with governments and other actors. The emergence of a transnational civil society, with its demonstrated successes in influencing national, donor, and international policy, can improve the outcomes of public policy. (1) At the same time, the emergence and growing strength of this sometimes well-organized, sometimes disparate advocate may exacerbate conflict and complexity, precluding the identification of workable solutions. The rise of transnational civil society further raises questions about these actors’ accountability: For whom do they speak? Are they legitimate representatives? And how transparent are they in their own processes? (2) The 1999 protests in Seattle over the World Trade Organization illustrate these challenges and point to the need to explore new processes and approaches to resolving multistakeholder, conflictive public policy issues, particularly those that are global in scope.
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Public Administration Vs Private Administration
Most authors differentiate public administration and private administration by educational institutions (public schools vs. private schools). Although it’s a good example to provide a comprehensive analysis between the two sectors, I found it not the quintessence for a comparative analysis. Historically, in our country, public schools have a much higher quality education than private schools, and studying economics and public administration, it is not just the nature of bureaucracies, nor the scope of public administration that the case today was reversed. While some authors identified over a dozen factors that differentiates public to private administration, Denhardt only speaks of the three fundamental differences between the two. In this paper, I would elaborate Denhardt’s three points since, together with economist Boadway’s Difference between Public and Private Sector, I found these as the most undisputable and concrete comparisons.
The most apparent difference between the two sectors is their organizing principles or goal. (Denhardt) While private administration has a definite mission, which is the pursuit of profit or stability or growth of revenues, public administration, on the other hand, has ambiguous purposes. Furthermore, the dilemma in ambiguity of purposes is exacerbated by too many unnecessary and inoperable agencies, with purposes that overlap and bloated bureaucracies. One might say that the goal of public administration is to enact public policies, but the overlapping and the main ambiguity of most of these policies, and the vagueness of the enactment of these policies make public administration’s purpose to be more ambiguous. Nevertheless, the fact that public institutions are not profit driven, should not lead us to believe that public sector employees and managers are not concerned about financial matters. As is the case with private companies, public sector units and organizations fight for funding and influence.
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Components of a Public Administration Program
A complete and adequate description of the components of a program is essential to assess its implementation.
Components are:
- the strategies,
- activities,
- behaviors,
- ways of communication and
- technologies for the implementation of the program and the specification of the beneficiaries and where the implementation takes place.
A proper and accurate identification of the components of the program will assess what aspects of the program were implemented as planned, and what factors of possible influence in the implementation differences.
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