Evolution of Public Administration

Evolution of Public Administration

• Public Administration has transitioned through three main phases: Public Administration, New Public Management, and Public Governance.
• The phases shifted from the early 1900s to the 1980s, the 1980s to the 2000s, and recently, the emergence of Public Governance.

Phases in the Evolution

• Traditional/Classical Public Administration occurred from the 1800s to the 1950s.
• Modern Public Administration began in 1950 and continues to the present through:
  • Development Administration (1950s-1960s)
  • New Public Administration (1970s)
  • New Public Management (1980s-1990s)
  • Reinventing Government (1990s)
  • PA as Governance (1990s to present)

Traditional/Classical Public Administration (1800s-1950s)

• Woodrow Wilson advocated for a distinction between politics and administration. Administration should be politics-free and aligned with business principles, establishing the "politics-administration" dichotomy.
• Frederick Taylor, known as the "Father of Scientific Management," promoted the "one best way approach". This contributed to the evolution of classical organization theory.
• Max Weber, a German sociologist and "Father of Modern Sociology," analyzed bureaucratic organizations and identified their key features such as hierarchy, division of labor, formal rules, impersonality, and neutrality.

Key Elements of Old Public Administration

• The dominance of the "rule of law"
• A focus on administering set rules and guidelines
• Central role for the bureaucracy in policy making and implementation
• The "politics-administration" split within public organizations.
• A commitment to incremental budgeting.
• The hegemony of the professional in the service delivery system.
• Principles of Old Public Administration include:
  • hierarchy and rules
  • permanence and stability
  • an institutionalized civil service
  • internal regulation
  • equality

Traditional/Classical Public Administration Principles

• All societies should advance general welfare or public interest.
• Public Administration should focus on administration "for" the public, rather than administration "of" the public.
• Client-oriented public administration has ancient roots.

Roots of Philippine Public Administration

• The origin is in American theories/principles, influencing the direction/development of formal study in the Philippines.
• Public administration as a field formally started with the establishment of the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) by Americans at the University of the Philippines (UP) in 1952. The Philippine PA theory is closely linked to American PA theory and practice.
• The US took control of the Philippines after a brief Filipino resistance and instituted a colonial government in 1900.
• During the American colonial regime, a US modeled system of government and political structure was established.
• The bureaucracy, educational system, and cultural practices reflect American influence.
• The Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935 and supervised by the US to prepare for independence.
• A constitution was framed and ratified, establishing a US presidential system in a unitary government.
• The Commonwealth government went into exile when Japan invaded Philippines during World War II.

Other Significant Contributors of Old PA

• Leonard D. White's work concentrated on the managerial phase of administration, instead of the politics-administration dichotomy.
• Henry Fayol gave 14 principles for achieving better outcomes from administration.
• Gullick and Urwick contributed POSDCORB.
• Simon's 1946 book, "Administrative Behavior" distinguished between theoretical and practical science, he also introduced more common principles in the literature.

Appleby and Waldo

• Appleby (1945) said public administration was at the "center of political life".
• Dwight Waldo (1948) tried to establish the direction/thrust of Public Administration as a field of study, which dominated administrative thinking until World War II.

Sayre and Selznick

• Sayre (1948) attacked public personnel administration.
• Selznick (1949) introduced the "cooptative mechanism.”

Follet, Mayo, and Willoughby

• Mary Parker Follet (1926) supported participatory management and the concept of contingency management.
• Elton Mayo conducted the Hawthorne experiments on individuals within an organization during the 1920s/1930s.
• William Willoughby (1918) focused on the role of budget as an instrument for democracy, executive action, and securing administrative efficiency/economy.

Barnard and Maslow

• Chester Barnard (1938) presented a theory of organizational behavior relating to the functions of the executive. Effective executives maintain an equilibrium between employee/organizational needs.
• Abraham Maslow (1943) focused on the hierarchical needs of the individual: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.

Modern Public Administration (1950 – Present)

• This indicative period of modern public administration began in the 1950s.
• Public administration has been characterized as having an "identity crisis" that led to the New Public Administration movement in the 1970s.
• Rutgers (1998) argued that public administration lacked an "epistemological identity.”
• Reyes (2003) revisited the "identity crisis" suggesting public administration should focus on the Philippines' development aspirations.

Development Administration (1950s to 1960s)

• Development Administration (DA) emerged as a field of study in the 1950s/1960s with third-world countries as the focal point.
• Nef/Dwivedi (1981) coined "development administration" referring to developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
• Developing countries made efforts to be recognized as "emerging nations" after World War II.
• Landau (1970) described DA as the engineering of social change.
• Ilchman (1970) said these countries were "concerned with increasing the capacity of the state to produce goods and services to meet/induce changing demands."

Gant, Khator, and Riggs

• Gant (1979) defined DA as addressing state functions and inducing/managing change to pursue development aspirations.
• Khator argued that DA was built on these assumptions: dev needs are most important, development needs between countries are different, development can be administered, know-hows are transferrable, and social cultural contexts that can be easily altered.
• Fred Riggs identified two foci in development administration: development of administration and the administration of development and synonymously the administration of development.

DA in the Philippines

• DA is seen as "management of innovation" aimed at helping countries undergoing reconstruction/social transformation.
• In the Philippines, "development administration" examined the State's experience rebuilding its institutions within a democratic framework amid globalization.
• DA principles have been a major theme with Raul De Guzman and O. D. Corpuz who questioned: "Is there a Philippine PA?”
• DA became associated with foreign aid and Western development models.
• Western countries provide grants/aid for nation-building, strengthening participation in development.
• De Guzman (1986) described the structural/behavioral characteristics of the Philippine bureaucracy.

Development Administration Features

• Development administration has been a central feature of long/medium-term Philippine Development Plans since the 1970s
• Bureaucratic reform continues to evolve in intellectual and practical debates.
• Philippine development plans have contained a chapter dedicated to development administration since the 1970s.

New Public Administration (Late 1960s to 1970s)

• "New Public Administration" or New PA emerged from the 1968 Minnowbrook Conference at Syracuse.
• The conference, created by Dwight Waldo, was controversial for rejecting classical administrative theories.
• Frederickson added social equity to public administration.
• Classic public administration only sought to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
• New goals included how to improve services or how to maintain service levels while spending less money.
• The question asked was "Does this service enhance social equity?"

Minnowbrook Conferees and New PA Proponents

• Minnowbrook conferees questioned the relevance of traditional public administration amid fast-paced technological advancement.
• Traditional PA focused on economy/efficiency of execution and a value-free stance which alienated the less privileged.
• New PA's proponents advocated that public administrators not be neutral, but rather committed to good management and social equity, non-bureaucratic structures and participatory decision making.

New PA Summary

• To conclude, New PA is "change" and public administrators must accept it.

Relevance of New PA

• Pilar (1993) questioned whether New PA was relevant in Philippine Public Administration.
• He argued that New PA can be regarded in terms of its compatibility with the context or environment and convergence between its goals, the purposes, and the aspirations of the country.
• The principle of New PA is compatible with the environment of the Philippine PA.

Is New PA Relevant in Philippines?

• The Philippines struggling with advancement and poverty issues makes it distinct. New PA created change to meet society's needs through the government's development programs.
• It also creates change through projects while addressing social equity/justice.
• The core questions raised by New PA relates to the "public" in public administration and critical to define the ultimate targets/partners of public administration structures and processes.

New Public Management (1980s-1990s)

• In the 1980s/early 1990s, a collective critique and strategies for internal/external reform emerged ranging from being more "client" oriented and decentralizing authority.
• New Public Management (NPM), used by European countries, was launched by Christopher Hood (1991), Christopher Pollitt (1990), and Michael Barzeley (1992).
• Similar movements including reinventing government and reengineering also merged then.

Origins of New Public Management

• New Public Management (NPM) began in the late 1970s in the UK under the Thatcher government, along with OECD countries like New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, and Canada.
• NPM became popular and stimulated political interest when Christopher Hood defined it in his 1991 article, “A Public Management for all Seasons."

Drivers of NewPublicManagement

• Contextual driving forces:
  • Fiscal crisis faced by governments
  • Plethora of public institutions and agencies
  • Inefficiencies
  • Non accountable system
  • Innovation in technology and information
  • Globalization and market competition
  • Demand for quality in public service delivery
• Theoretical driving forces:
  • Neo-liberal view (Von Hayek)
  • Public choice theory
  • Transaction costs theory
  • Principal-agent theory
  • Thatcherism

Elements of New Public Management

• Private-sector management practices
• Hands-on management
• Arm's length organizations
• Policy implementation distanced from the policy makers
• Focus on the entrepreneurial role of politics
• Inputs and output control
• Performance management and evaluation
• Service unit-based cost accounting
• Use of markets, competition and contracts for resource allocation/service delivery

Conceptualizing New Public Management

• NPM conceptually included arm's length organizations + management styles/techniques from the business sector, to achieve efficiency, effectiveness, productivity and accountability.

NPM in New Zealand and U.S.

• New Zealand’s reforms of privatized public functions, redeveloped personnel systems, productivity measures, and reengineered departmental systems is the best example of NPM.
• In the US, during the Clinton-Gore administration, this was reflected in their "National Performance Review" which has urged the federal government to improve performance.

Pollit on New Public Management

• It's shift into "managerialist": (1) main route to social progress is continuing to increase economically defined productivity, (2) increase productivity from the application of technologies, (3) application of technologies with a labor force disciplined in accordance to the productivity ideal (4) Management has a crucial role in improving productivity (5) Managers have "room to maneuver."
• Management and service must shift in order to meet goals.

Ideas of "Reinventing Government"

• "Reinventing government" originated from ideas aiming to solve economic issues during the 1970s and produce a government that is better, but cheaper.
• Championed by Osborne and Gaebler in 1992.
• NPM sought to improve the public sector through private sector innovation, using private sectors models for innovation, resources, and ideas
• Reinventing Government had 10 principles for entrepreneurs to conduct massive governmental reform.

Tenets of "Reinventing Government"

The tenets of "Reinventing Government" are:

• Catalytic government: steering not rowing
• Community-owned government: empowering not serving
• Competitive government: injecting competition to service delivery
• Mission-driven government: transforming rule-driven organizations
• Results-oriented government: funding outcomes, not inputs
• Customer-driven government: meeting the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy
• Enterprising government: spending instead of spending
• Anticipatory government: prevention instead of cure
• Decentralized government: from hierarchy to teamwork
• Market-oriented government: leveraging change through the market.

Criticism of Reinventing Government

• Criticisms include emphasis on people as "customers", and seeing customers as "end-product" users in government.
• Denhardt/Denhardt (2003) said the model for governance expands the role of the administrator as a key actor within the larger system of governance, they divided this into seven principles.
• Seven Principles by the Denhardts:
  • serve citizens, not customers
  • seek public service
  • value citizenship over entrepreneurship
  • think strategically, act democratically
  • recognize accountability is not simple
  • serve rather than steer
  • value people, not just productivity.

Main Limit of New Public Management

• Policy fragmentation
• Increased the distance between executive and politicians
• Outdated private sector management techniques
• Intragovernmental focus
• Input and output measurement
• Compression of democratic values in a pluralist world

Additional Notes on New Public Management

• The shift from New Public Management to Public Governance involves different values, different types of policy-making processes, and different types of organization and stakeholder.

Reinventing Government (1990s)

• "Reengineering organizations" is another similar movement coined by Michael Hammer (1990) in an Harvard Business Review article.
• Reengineering offers an approach for improving performance, effectiveness, and efficiency of organizations regardless of their sector.
• It is the rethinking/radical redesign of business processes to achieve improvements in performance measures.

Fundamental Actions of Reengineering

Reengineering includes tenets such as:

• searching for radical improvement in business processes from information technology
• breaking away from old ways and business processes
• reviewing business processes from cross-functional perspective
• questioning the necessity/purpose of process in organization
• searching systematically for radical changes in improvements to business processes
• reducing all unnecessary steps/documents
• focusing and developing around processes/outcomes.
• focusing on customer/client relation
• results-oriented approach to processes.

Re-engineering

• Re-engineering or business process reengineering (BPR) seeks to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and competitive ability and improve service delivery.
• Re-engineering upgrades governmental services.

PA as Governance (1990s into the 2000)

• Failed development interventions spurred the introduction of governance, which was then advocated by the UN, World Bank (WB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), and other international institutions.
• Governance has a larger scope and greater meaning. It involves the institutionalization of a system through which people articulate interests, exercise rights, and mediate differences.
• UNDP describes it as the exercise of authority to manage a nation's affairs, embracing all methods for distribution/power management.

Important Aspects of Public Governance

• Cariño (2000) said that governance needs for actors and factors to push for it. She recognized this extends beyond government to the market and civil society.
• Some of those factors/processes include growth/development, the environmental movement, globalization and consolidating peace, decentralisation, UN Charter.
• "Good governance" has emerged, becoming prominent in aid circles. From "governance."
• It demands that governments adhere to administrative processes and policy instruments towards the end.

Important Figures Regarding Good Governance

• Kofi Annan affirmed that governance and sustainable development are inseparable.
• Annan concluded that "good governance is the factors to eradicate poverty development.”
• An ADB document (2005) affirmed good governance is synonymous with development management, to include some key principles of development like:
  • accountability
  • participation
  • predictability
  • transparency

Phases of Public Administration

Aspects are:

• Theoretical roots, old approach used political science and public the new used rational choice and the current organizational sociology and network theory
• Nature went from a unitary to a disaggregated state, and now is pluralistic
• Changed in focus from the policy system, to intraorganizational management, and interorganizational
• Policy implementation began to focus inputs and outputs, then service processes and outcomes
• Relations became dependent within the system, to hiring independent contractors, and preferred inter-dependent contracts
• Governing mechanism’s went from top-down, to markets, and now relations
• Values are now about competition driving the marketplace

Public Administration in the Philippines

• Philippine Public Administration adapts to the idiosyncrasies of indigenous cultural traditions, values, mores, norms, and environment and history.
• It reconciles Filipino values ​​with Weberian models adapting colonial times.
• Today it is suited to the demands of particular situations now.
• The American system dominates the system's structures and formalities.

Philippine Independence

• The Philippines was a colony of Spain which declared independence in 1898.
• It was considered the first republic in Asia.
• Its independence was frustrated when it was ceded to the US.

Administrative Values in the Philippines

• It observes/pursues administrative values are a mixture of compatible influences.
• The influence of societal culture can be seen in the Filipino values with respect to elders or favoritism.

Weberian bureaucracy

• It remains equally strong in Philippine bureaucracy.
• Qualifications persist as a standard in recruitment, but value influence these procedures.
• Rules/procedures are observed, but can be set aside with intervention or cultural demands.
• The influences of the colonial periods impacts fitness and accepts competition.

Colonial Period Trends

• The colonial era influences include:
  • refusal to initiate
  • weak/indesicive Values ​​are a web of influences through social forces, which makes adapting to demands of the situation.