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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 (www.masseconoed.org), 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.”
Robert Steele, robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com
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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)
Robert Steele, robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com
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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
Robert Steele, robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com
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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,
Robert Steele, robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com
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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, robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com
1.0 16 July 2011