Contemporary Development Administration
Author: U. C. Mandal
Title: Development and public administration
The problems of public administration in developing countries are so vastly different from those of the developed world that a new discipline, development administration, has emerged since the 1960s to study them. Although a large number of books and articles have been written on the subject, questions still persist as to whether such a discipline exists or is necessary. Nevertheless, development has become a major focust of administrative activity in the countries of the Third World. The industrialized societes have recognised the need for these countries to gear their administrative machinery to new developmental tasks and responsibilities.
The major political phenomena in the latter half of the twentieth century constitute an intricate and complex subject, but they are susceptible, at the risk of oversimplification, to relatively brief summary and analysis. The first and most obvious condition has been the tremendous expansion of government functions and responsibilities every-where. A second phenomenon is the sub-stantial increase in the number of independent national states, as contrasted with the recent past. Largely, the product of the break-up of several old colonial empires - British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, and Portuguese - this development has taken place predominantly in Africa and Asia. Third, there has been since World War II a corresponding expansion of governmental activity in the international realm. Not only has there been, by treaty, a substantial delegation of decision making to supranational agencies (from regional to worldwide), but a far wider scope and magnitude of functions have been undertaken by such international bodies. A fourth political development is even more phenomenal: in the remarkably short span since World War II, the nations of the world have reached practically a universal awareness of the necessity for economid development in all countries, including the need to stem the tide of population growth so that increases in productivity provide more than a treadmill effect. Fifth, regardless of the form of government - democratic, monarchic, totalitarian, or variants of these - there appears to be an increasing dependence worldwide on the consent of the governed. A sixth characteristic of the times, and perhaps related to the point just made, is the continuing, if not actually an increasing, instability (or should we say, frequency of change) in government leadership.
Title: Development and public administration
The problems of public administration in developing countries are so vastly different from those of the developed world that a new discipline, development administration, has emerged since the 1960s to study them. Although a large number of books and articles have been written on the subject, questions still persist as to whether such a discipline exists or is necessary. Nevertheless, development has become a major focust of administrative activity in the countries of the Third World. The industrialized societes have recognised the need for these countries to gear their administrative machinery to new developmental tasks and responsibilities.
The major political phenomena in the latter half of the twentieth century constitute an intricate and complex subject, but they are susceptible, at the risk of oversimplification, to relatively brief summary and analysis. The first and most obvious condition has been the tremendous expansion of government functions and responsibilities every-where. A second phenomenon is the sub-stantial increase in the number of independent national states, as contrasted with the recent past. Largely, the product of the break-up of several old colonial empires - British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, and Portuguese - this development has taken place predominantly in Africa and Asia. Third, there has been since World War II a corresponding expansion of governmental activity in the international realm. Not only has there been, by treaty, a substantial delegation of decision making to supranational agencies (from regional to worldwide), but a far wider scope and magnitude of functions have been undertaken by such international bodies. A fourth political development is even more phenomenal: in the remarkably short span since World War II, the nations of the world have reached practically a universal awareness of the necessity for economid development in all countries, including the need to stem the tide of population growth so that increases in productivity provide more than a treadmill effect. Fifth, regardless of the form of government - democratic, monarchic, totalitarian, or variants of these - there appears to be an increasing dependence worldwide on the consent of the governed. A sixth characteristic of the times, and perhaps related to the point just made, is the continuing, if not actually an increasing, instability (or should we say, frequency of change) in government leadership.