The Postcard Project:

Future Directions in International and Comparative Administration

The Original Six Postcards

Introduction
Postcards from
... Paris
... Seoul
... Bamako
... New York City
... Rio de Janeiro
... Washington, DC
References

Further Contributions

... Derick Brinkerhoff
... Marc Lindenberg
... Fred Riggs
... Ted Thomas
... Tjip Walker

Contribute a Postcard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Mid-Life Crisis for International Development Management?

The notion of a disciplinary "mid-life crisis" for international and comparative management contains several elements within it that are worth unpacking and examining.  Taking the prototypical personal mid-life professional crisis, the internal conversation goes as follows: 

1. What I'm good at seems to be less relevant to today's problems and concerns.
2. I need to retool what I do to fit today's challenges.
3. I want to do something else, something new, something exciting.

1.   Is international development and comparative management less relevant to today's problems and concerns than in earlier days?

This crisis question relates to two issues:  a) the content of  international development and comparative management and its tool kit, and b) the content of the problem set that  international development and comparative management is applied to.  Taking the first issue, what of the "old" development management-- project/program/policy management, participation and empowerment-- remains applicable?  Is it really ossified and irrelevant?  The Washington DC postcard makes it sound that way.  But projects and programs still exist.  Policy implementation still poses thorny managerial problems.  Attention to participation and empowerment has increased, not diminished.   Thus it can be argued that a core administrative problem set remains for which the tool kit of  international development and comparative management, with its combination of process and technical tools, continues to be useful and applicable. 

Turning to the second issue brings us to the nature of today's administrative and management problems.  Here is where much of the current debate and discussion resides: globalization, the changing role of the state, international financial trends, complex emergencies, democratization, the rise of civil society and NGOs, citizen demands, and so on.  At a broad level, convergence exists around a couple of features of these problems.  First, they are becoming universal-- countries around the globe are facing them.  Second, they have new aspects to them that mean that old approaches are not applicable. 

For international development and comparative management these trends have pulled in some interestingly orthogonal directions.  Their evolving universality has fueled one-size-fits-all solutions: the New Public Management, the Washington economic policy consensus (IMF-USA), democratic electoral systems.  In this sense the rationale for a comparative perspective is called into question, because since the right solution has been found for all situations, who needs to compare?  Just do it.  But the second element moves the field in a different direction: the new aspects to these problems.  How can  international development and comparative management deal with these?  This leads to the second mid-life crisis statement. 
 

2.   Does international development and comparative management need to be retooled and reconceptualized to fit today's challenges?

This crisis question gets at the heart of the debate.  Fred Riggs, for example, strongly advocates casting aside the USA model as the universal public governance solution and looking carefully at the implications of the new aspects of the current management problem set sketched out above.  Each of the other postcards brings up variations on the retooling and reconceptualizing theme.  An important component to thinking about this question involves Don Schon's notion of "ideas in good currency."  Those of us who see ourselves as international development and comparative management professionals continue to see relevance in what we do and study, but often make assumptions about the perceptions of relevance of our discipline on the part of decision-makers and policy-makers.   Yet the extent to which management and administration are "in good currency" varies.  Think back to the Reagan/Thatcher days of public sector bureaucracy bashing.   A current example is the perspective taken on democratization.  Some policy-makers conceive of the transition to democracy as essentially a political and electoral matter.  The managerial and governance facets of democratization are downplayed. 

So some of retooling and reconceptualizing requires honing in on the critical managerial features of the problems that are preoccupying decision-makers and demonstrating how the discipline is relevant and useful.  Who sees the fit between international development and comparative management is important.  Importance, however, and being "in good currency" frequently mean being new and exciting.  This is the third question relating to the mid-life crisis.
 

3.   What new and exciting questions should international development and comparative management focus on and answer?

The distinct boundary between the sub-field of international development and comparative management and mainstream public administration is becoming fuzzier.  Riggs' contention that US public administrationists ignore the rest of the world may be less accurate today than earlier.  This suggests that, despite the challenges facing international development and comparative management, whether these constitute a mid-life crisis could be debated.  Is development dead?  No, it's just different.  Is international development and comparative management relevant? In short, yes.  But it is in elaborating a longer answer that the new and exciting elements can emerge.  Here are some illustrative questions for consideration as topics for investigation by international development and comparative management:

• How can international development and comparative management help to refine the New Public Management based on a closer investigation of the applicability of its principle features-- performance orientation, contracting out, transparency, accountability, and so on-- to particular country situations. 

 
• How can international development and comparative management help to decide what the state should and shouldn't do?  Is it all irrelevant because, as Korten says, "corporations rule the earth?"  Or is it more relevant because, as Bozeman says, "all organizations are public?"

 
• When civil society is weak and citizens' capacity to participate is limited, what can international development and comparative management tell us?

 
• When government capacity is weak what can international development and comparative management tell us?

 
• Can we learn something about the interplay between culture and management that we didn't know before?  Does the utility of international development and comparative management change depending upon whether we are looking at the macro/systems level or the micro- and/or individual-level? 

 
• Are there new analytic paradigms that hold promise in examining the new aspects of the problems facing the world?  For example, where does the new institutional economics lead us?  Are there new forms of institutional design that could be helpful in assisting governments to fulfill newly defined roles and citizen expectations?