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Public Administration on Developing Nations

Less-developed countries have had to face the opposite problem with their civil services. After World War II many such countries became independent before they had developed effective administrative structures or bodies of trained civil servants. Few of the colonial powers had trained indigenous administrators sufficiently. The British left a viable administrative structure in India and a partly Indianized civil service, but the newly independent Pakistan had few experienced civil servants. The Belgians left the Congo without any trained administrative or technical staff, and for some years there was near anarchy.

Even when they inherited reasonably efficient administrative organizations, the newly independent countries’ politicians frequently proved incapable of fulfilling their supporters’ expectations. Civil servants from the old colonial powers who remained behind often found radical policies and new masters uncongenial. The resulting exodus of many such civil servants worsened matters, for indigenous civil servants were seldom an adequate substitute.

The lack of qualified personnel sometimes led to not only a reduction in efficiency but also a decline in administrative morality. Nepotism, tribalism, and corruption as well as inefficiency in the civil service were difficulties often added to the other trials of independence. In many countries the incapacity of the civil service was a factor leading to military rule, as were the political failings of the elected leaders. Military regimes were frequently the last resort of a country where the civil power failed to cope with the problems of independence. Consequently, the United Nations (UN), in conjunction with the governments of advanced countries, began to develop training programs for civil servants from underdeveloped countries. The first request came from Latin America, which led to the founding of a school of public administration in Brazil, followed in 1953 by an Advanced School of Public Administration for Central America. Various other international organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, supported institutions for the training of administrators in less-developed countries. Such institutions included the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait, the Arab Organization of Administrative Sciences in Jordan, and the Inter-American School of Public Administration in Brazil. Civil servants from less-developed nations also studied administration at such places as the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the Institute of Local Government Studies in Birmingham, England, and the International Institute of Public Administration in Paris.

After the 1970s the international agencies gave less help toward training, on the assumption—often unrealized—that the less-developed nations would take on greater responsibility themselves. Training also tended to be generalist and academic, leading to acute shortages of trained administrators in specialized fields such as finance and planning. However, organizations such as the British Council began in the early 1980s to remedy some of these deficiencies.

Brian Chapman Edward C. Page Principles of public administration The classical definition Throughout the 20th century the study and practice of public administration was essentially pragmatic and normative rather than theoretical and value free. This may explain why public administration, unlike some social sciences, developed without much concern about an encompassing theory. Not until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy was there much interest in a theory of public administration. Most subsequent bureaucratic theory, however, was addressed to the private sector, and there was little effort to relate organizational to political theory.

Max Weber Max Weber Max Weber, 1918. Leif Geiges A prominent principle of public administration has been economy and efficiency—that is, the provision of public services at the minimum cost. This has usually been the stated objective of administrative reform. Despite growing concern about other kinds of values—such as responsiveness to public needs, justice and equal treatment, and citizen involvement in government decisions—efficiency continues to be a major goal.

In its concern with efficiency and improvement, public administration has focused frequently on questions of formal organization. It is generally held that administrative ills can be at least partly corrected by reorganization. Many organizational principles originated with the military, a few from private business. They include, for example: (1) organizing departments, ministries, and agencies on the basis of common or closely related purposes, (2) grouping like activities in single units, (3) equating responsibility with authority, (4) ensuring unity of command (only one supervisor for each group of employees), (5) limiting the number of subordinates reporting to a single supervisor, (6) differentiating line (operating or end-purpose) activities from staff (advisory, consultative, or support) activities, (7) employing the principle of management by exception (only the unusual problem or case is brought to the top), and (8) having a clear-cut chain of command downward and of responsibility upward.

Some critics have maintained that these and other principles of public administration are useful only as rough criteria for given organizational situations. They believe that organizational problems differ and that the applicability of rules to various situations also differs. Nonetheless, and despite much more sophisticated analyses of organizational behaviour in later decades, such principles as those enumerated above continue to carry force.

Public administration has also laid stress upon personnel. In most countries administrative reform has involved civil service reform. Historically, the direction has been toward “meritocracy”—the best individual for each job, competitive examinations for entry, and selection and promotion on the basis of merit. Attention has increasingly been given to factors other than intellectual merit, including personal attitudes, incentives, personality, personal relationships, and collective bargaining.

In addition, the budget has developed as a principal tool in planning future programs, deciding priorities, managing current programs, linking executive with legislature, and developing control and accountability. The contest for control over budgets, particularly in the Western world, began centuries ago and at times was the main relationship between monarchs and their subjects. The modern executive budget system in which the executive recommends, the legislature appropriates, and the executive oversees expenditures originated in 19th-century Britain. In the United States during the 20th century, the budget became the principal vehicle for legislative surveillance of administration, executive control of departments, and departmental control of subordinate programs. It has assumed a similar role in many of the developing countries of the world.

Recent interpretations The classical approach to public administration described above probably reached its fullest development in the United States during the 1930s, although since that time, through educational and training programs, technical assistance, and the work of international organizations, it has also become standard doctrine in many countries. However, some of its elements have been resisted by governments with British or continental-legal perspectives, and even during the 1930s it was being challenged from several quarters. Since that time study of the subject has greatly developed.

The orthodox doctrine rested on the premise that administration was simply the implementation of public policies determined by others. According to this view, administrators should seek maximum efficiency but should be otherwise neutral about values and goals. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so during World War II, however, it became increasingly evident that many new policies originated within the administration, that policy and value judgments were implicit in most significant administrative decisions, that many administrative officials worked on nothing except policy, and that, insofar as public policies were controversial, such work inevitably involved administrators in politics. The supposed independence of administration from policy and politics was seen to be illusory. Since the 1930s there has thus been increasing concern with policy formation and the development of techniques to improve policy decisions. Although the concept of a value-free, neutral administration is regarded by many as no longer tenable, no fully satisfactory substitute has been offered. How to ensure that responsible and responsive policy decisions are made by career administrators, and how to coordinate their work with the policies of politically elected or appointive officials, remain key preoccupations, especially in democratic states.

It was with governmental efforts to combat the Depression that new informational devices were introduced, including national income accounting and the scrutiny of gross national product as a major index of economic health. The applied techniques of fiscal and monetary policy have become established specializations of public administration. Economists occupy key posts in the administrations of most nations, and many other administrators must have at least elementary knowledge of the economic implications of government operations.