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The article tackles the question, how to provide students with a comparative orientation to public administration. We eschew the older tradition of comparing major systems such British parliamentary system or French bureaucratic approaches to organizations' structure. Rather, we seek to understand public administration in countries with different cultures, histories, and political regimes by focusing on international development. Our students are drawn from the Master of Public Administration degree program and the Master of International Affairs degree program. What unites them is an interest in international affairs and the desire to work internationally; international students take what they learn and apply it in their home countries. We ground the course on a model of international development with a strong focus on development in governance. We spend the first third of the class creating a development lens for understanding global practices in public management in which they use what they learned in the first part of the course to analyze a range of public management issues within governmental institutions and/or in working in the nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organization sectors. We use detailed case studies drawn from several case data banks to apply some of the core concepts of public administration such as leadership, stakeholder analysis, complexity, and implementation to development challenges such as fiscal issues, poverty alleviation, interorganizational collaboration, and human rights. We do this with a range of in-class exercises and assignments that students do out of class. One goal we have is to provide students with knowledge and skills to enhance their ability to work internationally since many have gone on to work for donor and various implementing organizations in international development. We believe that this is a reasonable measure of success of the approach we have taken to comparative public administration.

The academic/practitioner divide is real. Having observed and participated in this divide over four decades it seems as if the same issues get repeated over and over. This paper offers one approach that was used several years ago. The "case" is a collaboration between a recently hired Professor of Practice and the author, a full professor with only limited government experience. There were two main challenges in the relationship. The diplomatic had to adjust to a different organizational culture and the academic had to adjust to contact he wasn't familiar with. A new elective course was developed called, Drugs, Crime, and Terrorism. I describe this process and draw lessons about the value of this type of experience for faculty, practitioners, and professional education.

Introducing a new concept, skill or method to public affairs students always involves a decision about the most effective pedagogical approach that will achieve the instructor's objectives. In public affairs, education concepts are often abstract, complex and contested. One of the approaches that can be effective in introducing public affairs concepts is playfulness--simple anecdotes, mini, one page composite cases and scenarios and even "tricks" that can all be used to motivate a given subject. One technique is to introduce concepts with brief vignettes that have just enough detail to allow students to practice the concepts and apply skills that cut across the management and policy curriculum. Vignettes offer the immediate advantage of quick reflection and decision which can then be followed with deeper investigation and analysis. Students can practice thinking fast and thinking smart. Examples of policy and policy implementation from the author's teaching repertoire are used to illustrate the argument.

Repertoire: (1) a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. (2) the whole body of items that are regularly performed. (3) a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses. [https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+repertoire.] Assessing the impact of teaching on student learning is an educational enterprise that has been going on for many years. Less common, however, is the evaluation of the impact of teaching on the instructor. That is, how does increasing teaching experience both in terms of the number of years doing it and the diversity of teaching experiences improve teaching? This is, of course, an empirical question. This paper focuses on one type of teaching experience and its overall contribution to improving instruction in public administration and policy. I draw from experience in short-term, non-degree teaching in executive programs (EEs). These programs are aimed at middle-level or senior government officials and may be as short as one day or as long as four weeks (on rare occasions longer). I show how this type of teaching can improve one's teaching repertoire much like a young professional trombonist (think of Tommy Dorsey in his early 20s) or a fledgling comedian trying to make the big time developing a professional repertoire. One's repertoire is a combination of pedagogical technique and policy and management substance. Since short-term, non-degree teaching in EEs is different from degree-based, semester-length teaching, it presents specific challenges, especially for the novice EE instructor. As the repertoire improves via EE teaching, it is likely to transfer to more conventional graduate-level professional education. Case examples come from Hungary, the USA, China, Macedonia and Singapore.

This article adopts the perspective expounded by Weimer, and Vining and Weimer, that policy analysis requires "craft skills" and, therefore, one of the fundamental objectives of public affairs programs is to prepare graduates for the professional working world by providing opportunities to learn and practice these skills. Second, the article then introduces a method of experiential learning advanced by Weaver which he calls "quasi-cases." The two concepts are then linked through an exposition of a quasi-case--New York City's flirtation with "congestion pricing." The goal of the article is to show that by linking these two ideas, one can enhance experiential learning in the classroom (and outside the classroom) and thereby provide students with the opportunity to practice craft skills in semester length courses in addition to the usual approach of relying on internships and capstone projects to provide public affairs students with opportunities to learn what it means to be professional. The quasi-case of New York City's flirtation with congestion pricing illustrates the following ideas: 1) Economic concepts and tools are necessary but rarely sufficient to understand a policy issue adequately. 2) Policy takes place in a specific intergovernmental context that shapes both process and outcome. Understanding the intergovernmental context is important if one is to appreciate how various political constraints operate in the particular setting.

This article examines transnational dispersion that falls under the rubric of 'capacity building.' Capacity building is a phrase used by development specialists, international donors and foundations to describe myriad efforts to assist developing and transitional countries that seek to improve their governance processes. The article shows how there is no single, unambiguous meaning of the concept. Rather, it is used to describe both wide-scale governance reforms at the national level as well as interventions at the local level aimed at improving performance in specific areas such as public financial management and personnel administration. The argument is applied to Serbia. Keywords: capacity building, fiscal decentralization, world bank, United States agency for international development, Serbia

The concept of co-production (CP) is a key concept highly developed in the public administration literature reflecting the end stage of policy implementation. It is explored through a personal account of struggle and challenges through my two-year experience as a stroke survivor. The paper provides a very personal account of CP and by so doing I hope to shed additional light on the value of CP as a theory with a rich literature and as a valuable construct for practitioners and future public administrator and policy analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York City wrote an article in The Public Interest entitled, 'The Mandate Millstone' (Koch, 1980). In his characteristically blunt style, Mayor Koch [...]

Intractable long-term or chronic refugee communities present serious challenges to common refugee-management strategies. We argue that they are best understood and managed by using adaptive techniques drawn from complexity theory. To illustrate this strategy, we use the refugee communities situated along the Thai–Myanmar border as a case study. The article outlines the key elements of complexity theory, the complexity lens, for use in analysis of the problem. It then applies the complexity lens to the case study: identifying and describing the actors and networks that compose the complex system of the Thai–My refugees (the complex system) and the dynamic developments within that community over time (dynamic development). Based on this analysis, the article utilizes the complexity lens to evaluate the policy options commonly offered for the management of this ongoing refugee situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of donor-funded democracy promotion claim that these programs are frequently designed to reproduce social and governmental models drawn from developed countries and imposed on the recipient country without regard to local conditions, with experts parachuted in to provide guidance based on international 'best practices.' The critique focuses on first-generation development with a neutral, technical focus, whereas democracy promotion has evolved toward a more politically engaged approach to programming-what we label as second-generation and, more recently, third-generation development practices. We apply this distinction to the area of legislative strengthening (LS) by describing its history from the post-World War II period to the present and provide examples of LS projects to support the argument. The challenge is to combine valuable insights from best practices from decades of experience while adapting them through political engagement with local partners and with bilateral donors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]