Chester Newland
Reprinted with persmission from PA Times, June 2000

Globalization and the Nation State were a combined focus of deliberations in May at United Nations Headquarters. Social, economic, and political dimensions of governance were considered by 35 experts from 29 countries, together with observer/participants representing 41 organizations world-wide with related responsibilities. Concurrently, with ASPA as the participating organization from the United States, consultative meetings advanced development of the new UN Online Network on Public Administration and Finance—UNPAN. Representing ASPA at the UN Headquarters meeting were President Marc Holzer, Executive Director Mary Hamilton, and members Arie Halachmi, Lyn Holley, William Miller, Chet Newland, Harvey White and Allan Rosenbaum. Other particular initiatives considered included the Charter for the Public Service in Africa and the institution of an International Day of the Public Service and an award on public administration.

The Division for Public Economics and Public Administration of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) sponsored these sessions. Under Secretary General Nitin Desai opened the session, noting shifts to facilitative state roles and challenges of globalization. Division Director Guido Bertucci and professional United Nations staff asked those at this fifteenth biennial meeting of experts to review the medium-term plan for the period 2002-2005. Among UN professionals presenting plan concepts and principal details was ASPA member Jeanne-Marie Col, who focused on managerial responses to globalization at the nation-state level. Other subjects of detailed UNDESA papers were institutional responses, economic governance, and public-sector indicators. Highlights of some of these UN initiatives were earlier discussed by Bertucci, Col, and Demetrios Argyriades at ASPA’s National Conference in San Diego.



Governance: Three Dimensions

As an on-going conceptual framework, governance was analyzed as a much broader concept than government. Shabbir Cheema of the United Nations Development Programme summarized three dimensions advanced by the UN in recent years: 

• Social governance and civil society — stressing social norms, values, and standard setting and considering roles of culture, religion, and civil relations. 
• Economic governance and the private sector—stressing architecture for national and international economic activities; policies, processes, and systems of economic decision making; and roles of markets and the private sector in generating jobs, incomes, and goods and services.
• Political governance and the facilitative state—stressing policies, processes, and systems of political decision-making; mechanisms and structures to implement policies; and creation of a facilitative political and legal environment.

Human Values and Public Service

Human development is central to UNDESA’s managerial response to globalization, stressing public service as a key nation-state concern for human capital but, more broadly, valuing human dignity and involving people generally. Of some 20 managerial responses to globalization discussed, five sets that have also been focused upon by ASPA were stressed at the May session:
 

• Enhance competencies, performance, diversity, and image of public service to function globally, nationally, and subnationally (regionally/locally).
• Strengthen public service through demographic diversity and mobility, including considerations of gender, age, and varied populations.
• Facilitate accomplishment of results and strengthen planning and a future orientation, including facilitation of citizen participation/involvement in policy, program, implementation, and evaluation processes.
• Stress effective communications with diverse and large audiences, including media involvements.
• Enhance connectedness across sectors; facilitate time for reflection and real interactions; and match resources to outputs/outcomes.

The UN’s Division for Public Economics and Public Administration is undertaking creation of a global electronic network—UNPAN—to facilitate "exchange of expertise and sharing of experiences and lessons learned in public administration and finance at all levels"—local, subnational, national, regional/international, and global. The system design is based on servers at the UN in New York City and draws on regional/subregional institutions that are devoted to public administration and finance, particularly in contexts of social and economic development. 

This initiative was organized by creation of a task force in June 1999. A first Interregional Consultative Meeting was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in November. Eight regional centers comprised the system initially: three in Africa, one in the Middle East, one in Asia and the Pacific, two in Latin America and the Caribbean, and one in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Global expansion of UNPAN was considered at the May Consultative Meeting, following discussions with leading organizations in the field, including ASPA from the United States, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC), and the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), headquartered in Brussels. 

UNPAN design has been completed, and targeted completion dates call for having the system operational by Spring 2001. At the May session, an initial UNPAN classification of subjects was considered. That utilizes a detailed subject listing under six broad headings: public economic policies, governance systems and institutions, management improvement and change, information resources, human resources, and public finance and physical resources. While such system developments are now far advanced toward making UNPAN operational, capacities of regional centers require upgrading. For example, connectivity remains a major problem in some regions. 



Country Profiles on Public Administration

In collaboration with the IIAS, the UN Division for Public Economics and Public Administration has launched a survey to prepare country profiles. From questionnaire responses, 27 country profiles on public administration "covering all the regions of the world" have been drafted. Five profiles (Algeria, Brazil, China, Germany, and Ghana) were distributed to the Group of Experts for review at the May meeting.

Purposes of the survey and country profiles are: "to understand national public administration systems, to review how they relate to transparency, accountability and participation in respective countries, and to develop guidelines for institution-building and management capacity for development and growth." The UN’s stress in these profiles is on provision of useful information to policy makers and public administration practitioners—including highlighting of situational differences in social, economic, and political conditions and responses to them.

In short, twin demands and pressures of globalization (including transnational information and economic developments) and of localization (including citizen empowerment and place values) have culminated in urgent reconsideration of the character and roles of the nation state. These country profiles seek to bring to such reconsideration basic information on public administration. While they are not analytical and evaluative, in the sense of World Bank country studies, they contribute usefully to knowledge of how these countries profile themselves.



The UN, Nation States, and Human Beings

Nation states and human beings were twin concerns in creation of the United Nations. Following some centuries of early forms of globalization that featured competitive drives for power and destructive conflicts among nations, culminating in two world wars, aspirations were for global transformation through shared fundamentals of reasonable rule of law and human dignity. While those values remain elusive amidst many conflicts today, they remain central to work of the United Nations.

But realism today, as at the creation of the UN at the San Francisco Conference, is against the hopes of some back then for "a more perfect global union" through withering away of states’ powers. As reviewed at the Fifteenth Meeting of the Group of Experts on the United Nations Programme in Public Administration and Finance, evidence does not show that today’s forms of globalization are causing demise of nation states. Contrarily, "globalization is placing increasing demands on budgets" of most central governments, according to UN indicators, and "governments are responding to these demands." Indicators also show, however, that economic "globalization is not global." Of 116 countries reporting trade, only 81 reported 1990s increases in the ratio of trade to GDP. Externally based information technology, global communications, and increasingly global economy are nonetheless principal forces impacting nation states generally. Many people remain attached locally and/or nationally in those states, but this is another era of historical human migrations. 

Interdependence increasingly defines nation states and people as the hallmark of today’s globalization. In this environment, United Nations actions seek to facilitate constructive connectedness. UNPAN, the fast-developing initiative of the Division of Public Economics and Public Administration, is an example in which ASPA may directly share. 

Governance concepts constitute today’s framework for such developments—stretching imaginations and actions in these fields well beyond government to focus also on social capital and social self governance and on responsibly disciplined market economies. But, by contrast with some international thrusts of the 1980s and early 1990s, responsible democratic government—constitutionally limited but also empowered and robust—is highly valued today as essential to the interdependent facilitative states that seek to function effectively in balanced contexts of localization and globalization—valuing place and planet.