Public

Administration
Public Administration Is A Discipline
Which Is Concerned With
1. The Organization And The Formulation
And Implementation Of Public Policies for
the Welfare Of The People.
2. It Functions In A Political Setting In
Order To Accomplish The Goals And
Objectives, Which Are Formulated By The
Political Decision Makers.
 “Public Administration Is Concerned With
‘What’ And How’ Of The Government. The ‘What’
Is The Subject Matter, The Technical Know how Of
A Field Which Enables The Administrator To The
Technical Know-how Of A Field Which Enables The
Administrator To Perform His Tasks. The “How” Is
The Technique Of Management, The Principles
According To Which Co-operative Programmes Are
Carried To Success. Each Is Indispensable,
Together They Form The Synthesis Called
Administration”.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
 Importance of Public Administration in
Modern Life
• According to Woodrow Wilson, “Public
Administration is the detailed and systematic
execution of Law. Every particular application of
a law is an act of administration”.
• According to L.D.White, “Public Administration
consists of all those operations having
for the purpose of fulfilment or enforcement of
public policies as declared by competent
authority”.
 Public Administration is
• Decision making, planning the work to be done,
formulating objectives and goals, working with the
legislature and citizens of organization to gain
public support and funds for Government
programmes, establishing and revising organization,
directing and supervising employees, providing
leadership, communicating and receiving
communication, determining work methods and
procedures, appraising performance, exercising
control and other functions performed by
government executives and supervisors.
 ‘Public Administration’
Translates The Policy Goals Set By
Political Decision Makers, Provides
Goods And Services To People, And
Implements Socio Economic
Development Programmes For All
Round Development Of Society.
 ‘Public Administration’ Is The
Non-political Machinery Of The
Government Carrying On Its
Work For The Welfare Of The
People According To The Laws
Set Up By The State.
 POSDCORB
•Planning
•Organizing
•Staffing
•Directing
•Coordinating
•Reporting
•Budgeting
 Characteristics of Public Administration:
• Public Administration is often monopolistic.
• Uniformity in its treatment of the citizens
• Public accountability
• Are regulated by elaborate rules and regulations,
necessitating elaborate record keeping and
having regard for precedents.
• The aim of public administration is public
service, public interest and public welfare are its
prime
objectives.
Recent trends in Administrative
Study
•New Public Administration
•New Public Management
•Good Governance
•Public Policy Approach
•Decentralization
•Development administration
 New Public Administration
• New Public Administration is an
anti-positivist, anti-technical and
anti-hierarchical reaction against
traditional public administration.
• New public administration displayed
an intense concern for relevant
societal problems.
• The literature of the New Public Administration is
anti-positivist which means:
(a) They reject the definition of public
administration as ‘value-free’
(b) They reject a rationalist or perhaps deterministic
view of humankind,
(c) They reject-any definition of public
administration that was not properly involved in
policy.
• The New Public Administration is anti-technical
means they decry the human being sacrificed to the
logic of the machine and the system.
• The New Public Administration is more or less
anti-bureaucratic and anti hierarchical.
 Aims of New Public Administration
• The New Public Administration considers
mankind as having the potentiality of
becoming perfect. Humans are not static
factors of production.
• It stresses the central role of personal and
organizational values or ethics. There is an
essential relationship between the structures
and processes of administrative efforts and
their ends and goals.
• Social equity should be the guiding factor for
public administration. Social equity means
that public administrators should become
champions of the underprivileged sections of
the society. They must become active agents
of economic and social change.
• The New Public Administration advocates a
client-centered approach. It wants
administrators to provide the people a major
voice in how and when and what is to be
provided.
 What Administration should be:
• It should increase orientation towards changing
reality.
• It should influence policies that can improve the
quality of working life and it
should also have competence to implement such
policies.
• It should be more oriented towards measuring the
impact of laws on citizens
rather than resting content with their mechanical
application.
• It should be more normative and less neutral.
• Large and expensive public sectors put pressures
to cut programs and/or increase efficiency.
• There have been massive technological
innovations over the years, particularly, the
development of information technology.
• The globalization of economy with increasing
competition has become order of the day.
• It has become inevitable to liberalize the
economic sector following heavy burden being
imposed upon the national exchequer as a result
of mismanagement, corruption, inefficiency in
resource management, bureaucratic bungling etc.
 New Public Management
• New Public Management seeks to build an
administration by implementing flexibility,
transparency, minimum government,
de-bureaucratization, decentralization, the
market orientation of public services, and
privatization.
• NPM emerged in response to a number of
environmental forces which governments
everywhere have faced in the last twenty
years.
 Challenges NPM Raises:
• Bureaucracy is indeed powerful but does not work well
in all circumstances and has some negative
consequences.
• Trying to find the one-best-way is elusive and can lead
to rigidity in operation.
• Delivery by bureaucracy is not the only way to provide
public goods and services.
• Political and administrative matters have in reality been
intertwined for a long time.
• While there may be public servants motivated by the
public interest, it now seems incontrovertible that they
are political players in their own right.
 New Public Traditional Public
Management Administration
Government organization Break-up of traditional Services provided on a
structures into quasi uniform basis operating as a
autonomous units single aggregated unit

Control of public Hands-on professional Control from the head

organizations management with clear quarters through the hierarchy
statement of goals and of unbroken supervision and
performance measurement checks and balances
Control of output measures Stress results and output Control on inputs and
control rather than procedures
procedures

Management practices Using private sector Standard established

management style procedures throughout the
service

Discipline in resources use Check resources demand and Due process and political
‘do more with less’ entitlements
 What NPM Suggests:
• Government has a responsibility to steer the
delivery of public services in the addressing of
public issues.
• Government ought to be "community-owned"
and that the role of government is to empower
citizens and communities to exercise
self-governance.
• Competition is seen as inherently good such
that, through competition, the best ideas and
most efficient delivery of services can emerge.
• It should be the purposes for which agencies are
created that drive the activities of that agency,
not the rules that have been constructed around
that agency.
• Public agencies should be judged on the results
that they generate.
• the notion of individual is predicated on the value
of choice.
• Bureaucracies earn their allocation of resources
by demonstrating the value in terms of the public
good that they produce.
• Preventing rather than curing public problems.
• Maximizing the participation of the
broadest possible number of people
and institutions in the
decision-making process.
• It presumes that there is no one way
to deliver a public good and a wide
variety of delivery mechanisms are
possible.
 Good Governance
• Pai Panandiker - good governance as it pertains
to a nation- state which handles its people to
lead a peaceful, orderly, reasonable, prosperous,
participatory lives.
• In simple terms “political accountability,
availability of freedom, law abiding, bureaucratic
accountability, information available
transparently, being effective and efficient, and
cooperation between government and society.
Good Governance is measured by the eight
factors of:
• Participation
• Rule of Law
• Transparency
• Responsiveness
• Consensus Oriented
• Equity and Inclusiveness
• Effectiveness and Efficiency
• Accountability
 FOUR PILLARS OF GOOD
GOVERNANCE:
• Ethos (of service to the citizen)
• Ethic (honesty, integrity and transparency)
• Equity (treating all citizens alike with
empathy for the weaker sections)
• Efficiency (speedy and effective delivery of
service without harassment and using ICT
increasingly).
 Aims of Good Governance:
• Enhancing effective and efficient
administrations
• Improving quality of life of citizens
• Establishing legitimacy and credibility of
institutions
• Making administrations responsive,
citizen-friendly and citizen-caring
• Ensuring accountability
• Securing freedom of information and
expressions
• Making every department result-oriented
• Improving quality of public services
• Improving productivity of employees
• Eradications of corruption to re-establish
credibility of government
• Removal of arbitrariness in exercise of
authority
• Use of IT base services to de-mystify
procedures and improve the
citizen-government interface.
Public Policy Approach
 In the early 1970’s writers,
authors, academicians and
subject matter experts finally
awakened to the fact that
administration of a government
can never be free of political
elements.
 What is Policy
• Policy is made in response to some sort of problem that
requires attention..
• Policy is made on ‘public’s behalf.
• Policy is oriented toward a goal or a desired state, such
as the solution of a problem.
• Policy is ultimately made by governments, even if the
ideas come from outside government or through the
interaction of government and non-governmental
actors.
• Policy is interpreted and implemented by public and
private actors who have different interpretations of
problems, solutions, and their own motivations.
• Policy is what the government chooses to do or not to
do.
What Should Be There In Administration:
• There should be some clarification of values,
objectives, and criteria for decision making.
• The method should include identifying of
alternatives, with an effort to consider new
alternatives and to stimulate creation of several
alternatives.
• The method should include preliminary
estimation of expected payoffs from the various
alternatives, and decision on whether a strategy
of minimal risk or of innovation is preferable and
possible.
• Analysis of the alternatives should deal with both
quantitative (economic) and qualitative (political)
factors.
• The method should include an effort to decide whether
the issue is important enough to make more
comprehensive analysis worthwhile.
• Theory and experience, rationality and extra rationality
a mix of all these should be used.
• knowledge from various disciplines should be brought
to bear on the issues involved.
• The method should include explicit arrangements to
improve the policy-making by systematic learning from
experience, stimulating initiative and creativity,
developing the staff, and encouraging intellectual effort.
 The Contribution
•Harold Lasswell
•Herbert Simon
•Charles Lindblom
•David Easton
Decentralization
• Decentralization can be defined as
the transfer of authority and
responsibility for public functions
from the central government to
subordinate or quasi-independent
government organizations or the
private sector.
• transfer of responsibilities and
authority from higher to lower levels
of government.
• Decentralization seeks to create
relationships of accountability among
citizens, service providers, and
sub-national governments and between
the local and central governments.
• Administrative decentralization seeks to
redistribute authority, responsibility, and
financial resources for providing public
services between different levels of
government.
Administrative decentralization has
three major forms

•De-concentration
•Delegation
•Devolution
Development
Administration
Development Administration Is A
Dynamic Concept Which Brings
About Socio- Economic And
Politico-economic Changes In
Society. Aiming Towards
Development, It Strives For
Change, Growth, Progress And
Overall Development In Every
Sphere Of A Country.
 Reasons for the Emergence
of Development Administration

•Emergence of newly independent

developing countries.
•Development schemes in the
developing countries.
 Aims of Development Administration
• Change – oriented
• Goal - Oriented and result oriented
• Citizen participation in the administration
• Commitment to development
• Integrated and holistic process
• It has two sides – development programmes and
Its implication
• Its scope of Operation is wide.
• Stress on planning
• Believes in decentralization
 Working of Development Administration
• Change - oriented
• Goal and result oriented
• Flexible and dynamic
• Its objectives are complex and multiple
• Concerned with new tasks
• Believes in decentralization
• Stress on planning
• Creative and innovative
• Stress on participation of people
 Relation Of Public
Administration With Other
Social Science
 Psychology and Public Administration
• It inquires into the mind of man and his behaviour,
both as an individual and in groups and explains the
motives of human action in the society.
• Psychology is the study of human behaviour in
society while public administration is the study of
human action.
• Psychology is the guide of Public Administration
while it proceeds to frame a public policy.
• Action is motivated by a person’s psychological
behaviour; evidently psychology and public
administration are closely related.
 Politics and Public Administration
• Politics is the pursuit of power and it aims at
the advancement of public interest but
Administration is the exercise of power.
• Administration must know the political
conditions and a politician must know as
administration.
• The study of public administration deals with
all the processes of policy formalization,
political parties and public opinion.
 History and Public Administration
• History provides an insight into the past.
• The study of historical background of a country
enables us to understand its administrative
systems.
• History tells us how administrative problems arose
in the past and how they were solved.
• Modem historians have been paying increasing
attention of the prevalent administrative systems.
• Since experimental method cannot be successfully
applied to public administration, historical method
can be more useful and appropriate.
 Law and Public Administration
• The authority to enforce rules made by the lawmaker is
vested in administration. This is the relationship
between Law and Public Administration.
• Public Administration has to function within the
framework of the law of the country
• Public Administration has been described as a
machinery concerned with the 'systematic and detailed
execution of law'.
• Subjects like Delegated Legislation, structure and
functioning of Administrative Tribunals are studied in
order to have proper Public Administration system.
 Bhagwati Stands For What They
Called The Gujarat Model Of
Development, Which He Reckoned
Was Superior To The Contrasting
Kerala Model Of Development.
• He describes the Gujarat model as a metaphor for primary
growth and private entrepreneurship is driven development
and the Kerala model for a primary redistribution and
state-driven development.
• Sen had upheld what he calls the “Kerala experience” — high
social spending resulting in growth — as a role model for
other states to follow.
• The Nobel Prize-winning Harvard University professor is of
the view that the Gujarat development model suffered from
weaknesses on the social side and could not be considered a
success.
• Bhagwati’s letter had criticised Sen for his alleged ignorance
of growth.
• In his reply, Sen justified his works, saying that though he
argues for high spending in education and healthcare, that
didn’t mean he was against growth.
• The only Indian economist to have won the Nobel Prize in
economics had proposed a multidimensional approach to
measuring poverty than based on consumption alone.
• He also developed the capability approach, along with
the likes of Nussbaum, a concept that inspired the
creation of the UN’s Human Development Index.
• The capability approach brings in various factors,
including individual freedoms, which were excluded
from welfare economics earlier.
• It is Sen’s deep understanding of the general
equilibrium theory that prompted him to back high
social spending along with growth.
• In fact, none of the countries that have become rich
ever talked about any trade-off between social spending
and growth.