Conclusion: Getting It All Together

Abstract

As the aticles of the symposium present a wide variety of conclusions on whether public administration has “grown up,” this overview article does not attempt a unified synthesis of the authors’ views but rather makes a composite analysis of contrasts and patterns among them. Attention is then shifted to the organizing metaphor itself, that of maturation. Following a review of how each article employs it, some general reflections are offered on its usefulness.     

An Assessment of Recent Authors and Authorship Patterns in Taiwan's Public Administration Research

The public administration (PA) field in Taiwan has undergone a period of rapid transformation over the past two decades. The purpose of this study is to provide a more recent assessment of Taiwanese PA research. To that end, this study examines the characteristics of contemporary PA authors who published articles in five core PA journals in Taiwan between 1996 and 2007, assesses the journals' co-authorship/collaboration trends over the period, and identifies the publication and funding patterns of the 20 most-frequently published scholars. Implications of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed in the paper.     

The Ambivalent Relations Between Bureaucracy and Public Innovation: The Case of the Successful Failure of Dial Police

Building on a growing body of literature on public innovation and the rediscovery of bureaucracy, this article explores the relations between innovation and bureaucracy. A framework for studying innovation in a bureaucratic context is developed and its relevance assessed through a case study of the successful implementation but failed diffusion of an innovation project. The case study demonstrates how a bureaucratic context represents not only barriers to innovation but also a number of complex drivers. The outline of these ambivalent relations is used to tease out the Janus face of the new spirit of innovation in public administration.     

Symposium Introduction: Competency and Higher Civil Servants

‘Competency’ is a word that seems to have crept into the language of public administration and policy relatively recently, although largely under the radar of academic scholarship in Europe. This article introduces a symposium of papers that address key questions about competency management: how and why has it become popular and what are the implications of the spread of ‘competency’ approaches? As the introductory paper, it outlines the intellectual background to competency approaches and outlines three interpretations of their development. One interpretation sees them as a passing fad; a ‘difference’ interpretation sees them as a common label for widely varying patterns and practices; and a ‘sameness’ interpretation treats competency management as a symptom of broader politico‐administrative developments.     

Exploring the limits of institutional change: The direct election of mayors in Western Europe

The process of local institutional reform that different Western European countries underwent starting in the 1990s converged towards the direct election of mayors in Italy, England, Austria and Germany. Using a comparative analysis of those countries and including in it Belgium and the Netherlands (where the introduction of directly elected mayors is planned) and Greece and Portugal (with a long tradition of it), the article examines why countries with such different municipal traditions have tended towards the same institutional solution. The answer runs through the text implicitly: the institutional tradition of each country appears to have a greater capacity for explaining the outcome of the reform rather than isomorphism in the introduction of the direct election of mayors.     

Public Participation in Budgeting: The New Path of Budget Reform in Thailand

The purposes of this article are three fold. First is to explore the status of public participation budgeting in central, regional, and local administrative levels of Thailand. Second is to develop a model of public participation budgeting that fits with the contexts of each level. Third is to recommend some directions for budgetary reform in Thailand. This article employs qualitative methodologies using a multi-method approach for data collection, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, and work visits. The findings are discussed and compared with international experiences. Finally, a public participation budgeting typology is proposed and guidelines for budget reform are provided.     

The Design and Execution of Performance Management Systems at State Level: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Malaysia

This comparative study analyses the experience of Italy and Malaysia in the design and execution of performance management systems at the state level. The article investigates how performance management systems have changed over the past decades, the motivations behind their metamorphoses, their common elements across the two countries, and what accounts for the respective progress. It also investigates the role that the institutional framework plays in making performance management systems robust. The study presents policy recommendations on how governments can create more robust performance management systems for enhanced accountability and transparency in an age of resource constraint.     

Community engagement in Australian local governments: a closer look and strategic implications

Public input into decision-making through participatory and deliberative democratic practices has become a widely accepted and legislated responsibility of Australian local governments. At any one time, councils are leading submission processes, workshops and online surveys on a multitude of projects, ranging from long-term community strategic plans to public art projects. The increase in these practices has been exponential, leaving little time for critical reflection. The lack of empirical data to illustrate how community engagement is understood and practised in different councils has hindered sector-wide reflection. This paper presents the findings of the ‘Local Government Community Engagement Census’, a survey of 175 councils – approximately half – from 4 of Australia’s eastern states. This sectoral snapshot provides a picture of how councils understand, prioritise and practise community engagement, allowing critical reflection, an interpretation of implications and suggesting areas for future research.     

The Educational and Professional Goals of International Students in Public Service Degrees

International student enrollment in public service degrees such as Public Administration in the United States has grown rapidly. Harnessing this growth to improve the knowledge and expertise of employees in public service is a vital opportunity. However, our survey of public service schools shows that international students perceive an extensive lack of support with financial and linguistic challenges. Furthermore, schools practice little performance evaluation concerning international student experience. We conclude that schools collect more data on international students and communicate better information about programs to improve services and ensure that students know accurately what to expect from their overseas education.     

Political Entrepreneurs and Public Administration Reform: The Case of the Local Authorities' Unification Reform in Israel

This article examines a specific institutional change in Israel. In 2003 the Israeli Knesset implemented the local authority unification plan, an unprecedented reform in the structure of local authorities in Israel. This article is about a local government reorganization taking place in a unique political culture. This article tries to integrate the role of political entrepreneurs within an Institutionalist and “learning” perspectives to offer an explanation to a local government structure, thus politicians influence and are influenced by a wide range of institutional norms and practices in a complex process of design and determination of institutional change.     

Public Administration in Libya: Continuity and Change

ABSTRACT

Libyan public administration has been shaped by Libya’s history, ideology, and economy. It has been negatively affected by the political changes occurring since independence in 1951, particularly Gaddaf’s distinctive initiatives, and by upheavals in the post-Gaddafi transition. Libya’s rentier economy has had its impact on public administration, particularly through its promotion of widespread public corruption. This article analyzes the history of Libya’s politico-administration system before describing the current administrative arrangement, identifying the essential factors that have given rise to those arrangements, and analyzing the contemporary characteristics of public administration that constitute the key future challenges Libya faces.     

Conceptualizing the Tools of Government in Urban Network Governance

The alleged increase in new governance arrangements is often understood as a challenge, since public leaders are considered to be less able to influence and govern when government is only one out of several stakeholders. Some scholars argue that steering in such settings is fundamentally different from steering in a hierarchical context. This article aims to assess how a classic and generic analytical framework to tools of government, the NATO-scheme developed by Christopher Hood, fits in a setting where local governments attempt to influence networks. Based on in-depth studies of nine urban networks in Norway, we have assessed the toolbox and the use of different tools. The article demonstrates that the suggested generic framework makes sense in a network context. Thus, to bridge the classic literature on policy instruments and the growing discourse on meta-governance would probably be beneficial.     

Maturation of Public Administration in a Multicultural Environment: Lessons from the Anglo-Saxon,Latin, and Scandinavian Political Traditions

Abstract

A comparative analysis is made of three different models of public administration: the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Scandinavian. The purpose of this comparison is to analyze how these ideal-types of public administration handle the issue of power. Our argument is that without understanding and facing the issue of the amount of power that bureaucrats and politicians possess in any society, public administration will continue to be handicapped to understand the dynamics of the real world and therefore grow as a discipline. This is so despite the universalist claims of the currently fashionable ideas of the New Public Management.     

Public Administration Reform and Its Implications for Foreign Petroleum Companies in Kazakhstan

Since 2000, Kazakhstan has followed the New Public Management reform trajectory in modernizing its public sector and public service delivery. This article employs an actor-centered perspective to examine the effects of the public administration reform and its implications for foreign petroleum companies in Kazakhstan. The study builds on primary sources in the form of 81 semi-structured interviews with public servants, representatives of foreign petroleum companies and experts. The main conclusion is that the reform effects are ambiguous. Despite some success in greater efficiency of public services, many weaknesses remain, with highly varying implications for foreign petroleum companies.     

A Public Administration Headache: An Evaluation Analysis of Prison Policy and Recidivism Toward Social Reintegration

We focus on discovering, describing, and understanding prison recidivism; secondly, we intend to know if the prison policy contributes to deterrence of crime; thirdly, we want to know if prison labor and vocational education and training influence the rate of prison recidivism by increasing social reintegration or decreasing prison recidivism. We use a sample of n = 1643 prisoners, multivariate clustering methods, focusing on latent class models, to trace the profile of prisoners, and we use the chi-square test to test dependence/independence of some variable pairs. Data support the heterogeneity of inmates, resulting in two clusters, recidivists (50%), and nonrecidivists.     

Records Management: A Key Element for Effectiveness,Accountability and Development in the Greek Public Administration

Records management is a fundamental activity of public administration. Public records are a crucial component of the most human actions. They form the basis of any political and legal system and secure human rights. Records Management Systems provide information for planning and decision making, promote the government accountability, improve servicing citizens and ensure the organizations' enactments legitimacy. This article presents and evaluates the records management practices of the core Greek Public Administration by conducting a survey concerning the Greek Ministries and trying to find out in what level the records management initiatives are embedded in the business culture and applied by the Greek Public Agencies.     

Why Civil Society Cannot Battle it All Alone: The Roles of Civil Society Environment,Transparent Laws and Quality of Public Administration in Political Corruption Mitigation

ABSTRACT

Utilizing a large-N data that covers about 20000 observations from about 200 countries from 1789 to 2018 from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, and anchored on institutionalism as an overarching theory, and the nascent literature on civil-society corruption nexus, the paper looks at the predictive capacity of civil society environment, transparency of laws and predictability of enforcement, and rigorousness and impartiality of public administration in political corruption. Using a four-step hierarchical multiple regression, results show that while civil society and its structure is a significant determinant of the level of political corruption, the introduction of transparency of laws and predictability of enforcement, rigorousness, and impartiality of public administration, and civil society environment in the regression model accounted for additional variance in political corruption. Practical and theoretical implications, particularly on civil society-corruption nexus and the broader corruption-democracy linkage, are discussed.     

Public Service Motivation Scholarship in Africa: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Although several literature reviews have been published on public service motivation (PSM), none of them focused solely on Africa. Adopting a systematic review of the literature, we analyse articles on PSM scholarship in Africa published between 2005 and 2017. We found that authors in African PSM is consistently increasing with their research published in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals. The antecedents and consequences of African PSM are similar to those of Western countries. Finally, respondents of African PSM scholarship are skewed towards “managerist” and students’ perspective. We proposed agenda for African PSM research with four key interest areas.     

Inter-Municipal Cooperation and Satisfaction with Services: Evidence from the Norwegian Citizen Study

We investigate the effects of inter-municipal cooperation on citizen satisfaction with fire services and refuse handling. While there is a growing interest in cooperation as a way of providing municipal services, little is known of the effect on citizen satisfaction. Through a multilevel analysis combining individual and municipal data, we find that inter-municipal cooperation has a negative effect on satisfaction with fire services, no effect on refuse collection but a positive effect on satisfaction with source separation. The results, we argue, show how the organizational form may affect satisfaction in different ways depending on service characteristics.