Defining development administration
In order to properly define development administration, one must separate the two words and characterize each concept first, before combining them into a single idea. This essay will first describe administration as in the public administration literature. Then it will explain development as used by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in terms of economics. Then it will examine the identified inequalities created by the global system in an ethical perspective of helping to increase human capacities. Finally it will suggests the unification of development administration on a state by state basis to ultimately help promote progress and advancement for modern society.
Administration, as similarly defined in the field of business administration, advocates for the use of scientific management principles like efficiency and effectiveness to direct and lead an organization. Woodrow Wilson defined the field for public institutions in his seminal work, “The Study of Administration” which he wrote in 1887 as a response to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This federal law established the merit base system for bureaucrats, eliminating nepotisms in public agencies. Wilson’s essay argues for the separation of politics from administration and suggests that government should take a more appropriate, efficient and cost effective businesslike approach. His advocacy for a businesslike operation of public organizations, as well as the separation of politics and administration, professionalized the field of public administration within the US.
The field has evolved drastically from investigating New York City Bureau through their municipal research department to the theorizing of the concept of New Public Management. For example, Fredrick W. Taylor (1912) in his essay “Scientific Management” felt that the best management is like science in that “it rests upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles.” He suggested methods to make workers more productive. Political scientist Larry Gulick (1937) added how government services could provide more by following his POSDCCORB typology, which stands for Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting.
Leonard White (1926) furthered Wilson’s discussion of the political and administrative dichotomy, by adding that management should adjust to America’s federalist state and its organizational structure. Frank J. Goodnow (1900) attempted to give different roles and purposes to government’s administrative and political sides and, finally, argued that the administrative side dealt with the implementation and the processes, while the political side focused on creating the institutions that formulate, adopt, and implement policies, at the same time as reinforcing each other.
Furthermore, organizational structures are discussed in Morton Grodzins’ “ The American System” written in 1966 and Herbert Kaufman’s “Administrative Decentralization and Political Power” in 1969. These essays argue that government must represent society, as a whole, and in doing so, have organizational issues. For example, Grodzins suggests that functions overlap in government. He describes chaos found in the US government, with its mixture of powers from the various layers of local, state and national governments, which makes a “Marble Cake” affect in America—overlapping tensions and roles of government. Furthering this discussion, Kaufman calls for more decentralization and direct democracy, where citizen controls of local resources by participating in government agencies. This also highlights the political aspects of public administration within a liberal democracy paradigm.
Since the 1980s, public administration literature has focused on Public Management which promotes the reduction of public spending, along with balancing budgets, contracting services, lower public spending, and the delegating responsibilities to lower levels of the bureaucracy, civil society or other social actors. These policy recommendations enveloped into a global movement called New Public Management, which also has been equally critiqued for its lack of incorporating politics into the efficiency arguments of managing governments (Kettl 2005, Light 1997). Ultimately, one can see that public administration is the application of business principles into administrating government thus delivering public services to the people most effectively.
Development, on the other hand, is very nuanced and has an extensive history, as long as civilization and the conquest of people (Diamond 1999). According to Peet (1999) “development means improving the conditions of life… economics is knowledge about the effective use of resources in producing the materials basis of life.” He continues to suggest “development is fundamentally an economic process, economics has an abiding interest in development and all theories of development have significant economic dimensions” (Peet 1999: 17).
Development economists therefore evaluate and research ways to increase Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the measurement of national income and output for a given country’s economy. Economists have divided the world into developed, low and middle income and lest-developed countries. The developed economies—often referred to as the industrialized or post-industrialized societies—are characterized as members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Low and middle-income countries have not reached the sophistication of those in high-income countries, but they typically have somewhat developed health and education systems and frequently provide primary materials for construction of modern economies. They are often called transition or BRIC (Brazil, Russia India and China) economies because of the near reach to the developed countries. One the other hand, least-developed countries measured as the low-income, with per capita GNI less than US$900; have highly weak human resource, from low social indicators like nutrition, health, education and adult literacy; and have extensively economic vulnerability. Examples include Sub-Saharan Africa, part of the Middle East and some countries in Latin America (Sachs 2005).
For the better half of the past fifty years, the focus of development economics has been on the increase of economic growth. Therefore, in order to understand growth, would need to look at the establishment of the modern international system. In July 1944, the United States hosted the Bretton Woods conference for the allied powers after World War II, which created the new global order to regulate the international monetary and financial order. Their primary concern was to find ways to finance the reconstruction projects in Europe after the war. Several global institutions were established, including the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now called the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was expanded to the World Trade Organization (Milner 2005). Additionally created in the 1960s was the International Development Association (IDA), which specifically aimed to reach the newly established and independent countries of Africa and the least-developing nations.
Furthermore, the World Bank took the lead to assistance developing economies through loans and specific policies recommendation to promote growth. Economists, the most predominant profession employed by the World Bank, typically provided technical assistance through loans to developing countries, based on guarantees from United State Treasury Bills. There are various economic theories that have been encouraged when the loans were shaped for the developing nations. They include endogenous growth theory, economic base, trade theories and human capital development, technology transfer, among many others ways (Sachs 2005).
A short review of the history of development strategies attempted in the developing world will reveal that several top-down attempts to promote growth. For example attempts at centralize planning in the 50s, the green revolution using technology within the agriculture sector of the 60s, infrastructure development and import substitution 70s, to strict application of neo-liberal policies stressed by the Washington Consensus in the 80s, the luring of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) of the 90s, to more “cultural” approaches today. Although all of these top-down strategies may account for some of the economic growth, they certainly have not helped to balance out the inequalities within the developing countries.
Yet, World Bank’s message has changed from exclusively economic development to incorporate not only growth, but also fair growth, which consist of the elimination of inequalities and promotion of poverty reduction (Birdsall et al. 2007). Consequently, beginning in 1990s the IFIs began to finance governance projects, but more elaboration will proceed. This notion to encourage the elimination of inequality and assist with human development was encouraged by the United Nations through its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established in 2001, the MDGs are eight development goals that 192 UN member states and several international organizations have agreed to achieve by 2015. They include the human factor of development, for example reducing extreme poverty and child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and ensure environmental sustainability (Ganapati 2004).
In his working paper, Ganapati suggests that the MDGs create a multi-dimensional look at development, presenting human, sustainable and institutional strategies to achieve these goals. Human development focuses on people’s capabilities for example “to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable and to have a decent standard of living” (Ganapati 2004). The Human Development Index (HDI) measures these capabilities annually by specialist at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Sustainable development focuses on the Agenda21, which was the political pact of 179 states made in Rio in 1992 and expanded by the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002 (Ganapati 2004). It aimed to improve the environment including preservation of natural resources, cultural heritage and reduction of pollution emissions and greenhouse gases.
Finally institutional development focuses on the “humanly devised constraints that shape human intentions” or “the rules of the game by which individuals in society find themselves when contemplating action and the rules” (Ganapati 2004). Established by the work of New Institutionalism lead by Douglas North (1990) in economics, the field also includes the areas of political economy, political science and sociology. The theory focuses on the process of development rather than exclusively on its outcomes, i.e. the enforcement of property rights, good governance and regulatory forms rather than increased GDP (Ganapati 2004). According to Ganapati, this final element does move the debate beyond the typical state vs. market discussion but it also pokes at provocative new questions of institutional determinist, defining who has good institutions and who defines what they are.
Kim Moloney in her dissertation research on “Understanding the World Bank as an Organization: A Study of its Public Sector Management Projects (1983-2007)” indicated with that the World Bank first included the topics of good governance, decentralization, corruption, and accountability within its technical assistance in 1991. Through their general council’s office, the topics of Western style governments, including those of American public administration, were becoming imposed into the developing world. Furthermore, her research indicates that these types of projects have evolved into only about 25 percent of their annual portfolio in 2007. This inevitably is the Kettl and Light diffusion of the concepts of New Public Management so put forward within the field of American public administration.
Yet, this sense of institutional determinism has an ethical question of whose norms should be disseminated. Cited by Milner (2005) that the current international development debate whether Rawls arguments in his famous discussion of distributive justice are meant to be global. That is to say, whether the international community should be at the aid of the less fortunate and if they do get involved what types of assistance should play a role. Furthermore if we accept Rawls’ claims to include “well-ordered societies” to help the “burdened societies” which they have the “duty of assistance,” then the developing world should take the led from the developed and create clean and just institutions (Milner 2005:844). The delicate line creates possible criticism especially from imperialistic world, which relates back to the conquest societies from the colonial pasts of the European expansionism in the 1800s to the American super power status in the 1900s onto today. Furthermore, does this than mean that we are in the bi-polar world of US capitalist markets based on free liberal democracies vs. those in the Russian/China Soviet blocks which support purely governmental based growth strategies?
One way to bring the debate into perspective is to look at how diverse administrative structures are different and how their populations’ histories and cultural legacies define their modern day endowments. Fred Rigg’s study of administrative ecology in the US, Thailand and the Philippines does precisely that (1961). He seeks to discover the direct and indirect influences on administration and divides society into economic, social and symbolic factors. Therefore development administration is the study of how governments are formed and how they can be shaped to provide efficiency and effective public programs to their communities—taking into consideration the historical legacies and cultural effects that shape their public lives.
Above all else, as with the study of public administration, development administration must deal with the tensions between being an art and a science. For example as is the current focus in the US on New Public Management, which is just another push for more scientific approach to public policy or positivism in the social sciences. But politics is an art and it must equally be studied as such. This is especially true when the politics is located in a foreign country with different institutional contexts within the globalize world. Therefore maybe the best way to define development administration is that it’s a craft. If developing countries can take this craft and adopt it for its own, they will also have strong institutions to manage public issues.
Bibliography
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