INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

During the last quarter century, industrialized democracies have witnessed a fundamental shift in the purposes and methods of government. These changes raise questions about the scope and nature of public administration, both as a profession and as a scholarly discipline. For virtually all of the twentieth century, public administration was synonymous with bureaucracy, hierarchy, and accountability.

These included adoption of market-based management and resource allocation techniques, an increased reliance on private-sector organizations to deliver public services, and a deliberate and sustained effort to downsize and decentralize government’s role as the central policy actor in society.

Since the 1980s, the scholarly record has seen increased attention devoted to the “hollow state,” a metaphor for government that contracts public service provision out to networks of (mostly) nonprofit organizations and reduces its role as a direct supplier of public goods.

The Weberian model of bureaucracy and management is undoubtedly less relevant to public administration than it once was, yet it remains a sharper set of intellectual tools than the stillfuzzy concept of governance.

Frederickson argues there are five main problems with the state of the governance framework. First, it is fashionable; governance has become a catchall phrase. Second, as we discuss later, governance, in its current form, is imprecise. Third, governance is “freighted with values”. Those employing the term governance tend to have preexisting negative views of government institutions and orthodox bureaucratic structures. Fourth, “governance is primarily about change”. Governance does not have to be a prescriptive framework, emphasizing reform and the restructuring of institutions. Governance can also be used as a descriptive term for interjurisdictional relationships between public and private actors. Fifth, governance theory tends to give disproportionate weight to “non-state institutions”. Rarely are services provided in the complete absence of public or governmental institutions. Instead, public service delivery is often characterized by “publicprivate partnerships”.

These begin with a definition of governance as the “regimes of laws, administrative rules, judicial rulings, and practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable government activity, where such activity is broadly defined as the production and delivery of publicly supported goods and services”. This definition implies that governance consists of separate but interrelated elements. These elements include organizational, financial and programmatic structures; statutes and laws; policy mandates; available resources; administrative rules; and institutionalized rules and norms.

At the institutional level, there are stable formal and informal rules, hierarchies, boundaries, procedures, regime values, and authority. The institutional level of governance is aimed at understanding the formation, adoption, and implementation of public policy (especially the latter).

Outputs/outcomes = f [Environmental factors, Client characteristics, Treatments, Structures, Managerial roles and actions]

NPM characterizes a global public management reform movement that has redefined the relationships between government and society.

In a wide-ranging overview of this reform movement, Donald Kettl argues that it is predicated on six core issues.