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This paper describes the pedagogical efforts of 67 NASPAA programs offering a specialization in global/comparative administration and policy. A web content analysis of course and concentration titles, course descriptions and syllabi of 67 programs with this specialization showed that across all programs, 52 unique concentrations were offered, and graduate students had access to 279 courses as core and elective offerings. This paper explores the specific pedagogical efforts undertaken to introduce comparative administration and policy concepts to graduate students. Implications of this study for graduate education in public affairs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Master of Public Administration (MPA) alumni face increasingly diverse and global professional expectations. Public affairs specialists generally go on to manage complex partnerships that involve a wide array of participants. Public administration education ought to do its part to ensure these graduates succeed. In this sense, we offer comparative public administration (CPA) as an effective, multipurpose tool for disassembling public monuments to parochialism and sculpting competent practitioners that reflect our stated desires for a more inclusive orientation. First, we seek to define CPA and consider its relative importance. Next, we assess how CPA is currently taught in Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs within the United States. The focus then shifts to discussing how MPA programs should be teaching CPA and proposes learning outcomes. Finally, we offer tools for attaining these outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three major characteristics—themes, research methods, and authorship—of Korean public administration research written in the Korean language during 1999 to 2009. It suggests that this research has evolved and advanced both quantitatively and qualitatively. Recent Korean scholarship can be characterized as consisting of more reform-oriented topics, more quantitative methods, and more diversified authorship. These characteristics were partially caused by increasing social demand for government reform and growing emphasis on methodological rigor in public administration research, as well as increased government research funding for graduate programs. This also concludes that the Korean public administration research has advanced greatly in past decades but needs a better thematic and methodological balance as well as balance between theoretical and prescriptive studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objectives of this article are to (1) define the contributions of the Comparative Public Administration to knowledge of governance, management of public services, and national development; (2) assess the relevance of these contributions to the African experience; (3) examine how comparative research, despite certain limitations, had steered public administration out of its ethnocentric and provincial mode of analysis into a wider global horizon of search and discovery; and (4) examine the relevance of development administration concepts to practice in Africa, particularly during the formative phase of post-colonial experience. The article offers suggestions for change strategies.Points for practitionersComparing public administration practices of a country with those of other countries, with past performance, or with benchmarks is vital for administrative improvement and for developing reform strategies. Administrative knowledge, derived through cross-cultural comparative analysis, provides a broader horizon for the practitioner of management and better understanding of the larger context of governance. Also, comparison provides the practitioner with significant insights into policies and actions that work and those that do not work at the local, national, and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper briefly explores instances of administrative indigenization-defined as native patterns neither imposed nor copied from Euro-centric systems-and implications for the study of Comparative Public Administration. China and Iran-as presented in the Comparative Public Administration literature, broadly defined-are suggested as iconoclastic administrative models which are both viable and interesting and in contrast with Western (Northern) models of study and application. Other emerging models-many of them based on grass-roots movements (not to be confused with terrorist movements)-also provide alternatives to the prescriptions of the New Public Management as well as to the conventional secular, “non-political” hierarchies. Comparative Public Administration needs to accommodate such alternatives on a coequal basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]