Development Administration Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Development administration became a strategic concern in American social sciences and to policy makers during the late 1950s, with Walter Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Western development literature tried to identify the noneconomic conditions for accelerated and orderly economic growth. Development administration was understood as a mechanism contributing to economic growth, stability, and systems maintenance, along with its traits of efficiency, stability, and legitimacy for nation and state building. It offered an institutional framework to convert inputs of objectives, capital, and know-how into developmental outputs. Even after the idea flagged in the West in the 1970s, it left its imprint in the lesser-developed countries of the Middle East, East and South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These were countries either emerging from decolonization, seeking to secure the benefits of bilateral and multilateral aid for of economic and social development, or both.

Development administration so conceived emphasized the formal and technical aspects of government machinery. Developmental goals were assumed to be self-evident and, therefore, agreed on by local Westernized elites. These goals were broadly defined as nation building and socioeconomic development. Authors like Irving Swerdlow identified two interrelated tasks in the development process: institution building and planning. Still others emphasized numerous development oriented activities, such as the management of change, establishing an interface between the “inner” environment and the larger intra and extra societal context, and mobilization of human and physical capital for development objectives and related democratic politics.

During the 1970s and 1980s, worldwide prosperity increased, especially among the industrialized nations. It was expected that by applying modern technology, developing nations would overcome the challenges of poverty and lack of development that lay at the heart of instability, insurgency, and the appeals of communism, and this belief was reinforced by the strong evidence of successful rapid post–World War II (1939–1945) reconstruction. The approach was essentially clothed in pragmatism in the vein of scientific management. The assumption was that problems, whatever their nature, lay with and at the periphery. By contrast, the solution to all problems was always in the developed world.

The developmental creed that emerged posited that to attain development, a country’s administrative structure needed to be overhauled and revamped to conform to the standards of the most advanced industrial societies. The issue thus consisted in the reorganization of the existing traditional machinery into a new entity. This process was known as administrative development: the modernization of the public service machinery through exogenous inducement, including the transfer of technology and the training of local staff by foreign experts. For this task, there was already a prescriptive bureaucratic model to be found in Western traditions: the administrative state. This administrative state was based on the dichotomy between politics and administration, a pyramidal hierarchy, unity of command, political neutrality, recruitment and promotion based on merit, public service accountability, objectivity, and integrity. In reality, a parallel value system encompassing these traits often coexisted in those parts of the world where Western models were set up that operated concurrently with traditional cultures, economies, and markets. The principles of development administration were generally accepted at face value by the indigenous elites, especially in those countries in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, where a relatively peaceful transition to nationhood had taken place.

The post-independence political and bureaucratic elites rapidly moved to replace colonial administrators. Western education was widely perceived to be the vehicle both for personal advancement and for acceptance into the global community of Western-trained professionals, and these postcolonial administrative systems continued to be imitative and ritualistic. Practices, styles, and structures of administration generally unrelated to local traditions, needs, and realities succeeded in reproducing the symbolism—but not the substance—of British, French, or American administrative traditions. Even where a relatively large contingent of trained functionaries existed, as in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nigeria, or Ghana, the old “law-and-order” colonial administrative culture prevailed. For most of the local elites, technical solutions and formalism appeared more palatable than the substantive political options needed to bring about real socioeconomic change. Reorganization and rationalization soon became ends in themselves, displacing the developmental features of development administration.

From Hope To Growing Doubts

The early euphoria of the 1960s soon gave way. With energy and debt crises bringing two decades of prosperity to a rather abrupt close, the foundations of development administration were shaken. Its usefulness for the third world was called into question, and an intellectual crisis spread among students of development administration in Western countries. The gap between the center and the periphery was widening rather than narrowing, in both relative and absolute terms. Instead of development and nation building, turmoil and fragmentation proliferated throughout the “other” world, including urban crises, drastic cessation of growth, unemployment, breakdowns of public institutions, and decline of civic probity.

During the subsequent third and fourth development decades of the United Nations, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) advanced by the nonaligned movement became an important new symbol in the development arena. Its demand for a basic realignment of the world economy and substantial changes in trade, aid, and technological transfers was generally ignored by the richer donor nations. There was no consensus concerning NIEO objectives, and some commentators felt that it might even harm certain countries. While the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO) endorsed this discourse, the monumental change demanded by the NIEO did not occur. In the absence of shared strategies, the NIEO soon went the way of earlier concepts.

By the end of the 1980s, two other major and interrelated events changed the parameters of the existing global order. These were the dissolution of the Eastern bloc and the related entry of former communist states into the realm of third world nations and the accelerated process of globalization.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe coincided with a revival of ultraconservative ideologies in the West. First, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and later Ronald Reagan (and similar events in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) added a powerful impetus to a new administrative discourse: new public management (NPM). NPM dominated the scene during the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It emphasized drastic reforms predicated on a number of standard prescriptions: (1) accent on results, both in the planning and in the evaluation of programs and personnel; (2) treatment of the public and citizens as customers; (3) delegation of authority as close to the action level as possible; (4) empowerment of “clients” (devolution); (5) greater attention to cost through comprehensive auditing, contracting out (outsourcing), and introduction of competitive practices into the public space; and (6) private sector techniques intended to motivate employees, such as merit/performance pay, mission statements, and quality circles. Other key operational principles included budget restraint and downsizing bureaucracy. NPM also introduced market-driven language and the notions of corporate management and corporate culture. This paradigm was based on the premise that by reducing bureaucracy and monopolistic practices, corruption would decline, and that by narrowing down the scope of government activities, an efficient, transparent, and accountable system of governance would necessarily emerge.

For the following two decades, NPM became a fixation in the Anglo-Saxon world as well as in some important international financial institutions. The greatest charge against the type of managerialism promoted by NPM was its reductionism and lack of imagination. It tried to encapsulate a complex prismatic phenomenon into a single model drawn from an idealized version of the private sector that, in reality, existed in only a limited number of capitalist countries.

The strategy accompanied the programs of structural adjustments with which development agencies sought to address the needs of countries in the third world. As one–size-fits-all solutions, NPM recipes seldom availed the countries for which they were intended. Poorer nations ceased to be treated truly as recipient countries; they were compelled to make net transfers of their meager resources to the West. Led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a new economic and financial orthodoxy (called structural adjustment) resulted in severe setbacks to development and living standards in poorer nations. To service their debt, several countries came close to bankruptcy, and their governments became receiver states. Despite exhortations for “freer” trade, restrictive global trade practices and biases prohibited poor nations from really taking advantage of the so-called comparative advantages. The problem was further compounded by commodity prices falling to their lowest level in fifty years, while the prices of manufactured goods from rich countries, as well as foreign debts, kept rising. In this context, it is not surprising to see that poverty, inequality, repression, and despair continued to rise in the southern hemisphere.

As had happened with the calls for a new international economic order in the 1970s, the new expanding global inequity brought about a growing awareness of the need for reform, as displayed at the Earth Summit in 1992 and the Millennium Summit at the United Nations in New York in September 2000, which resulted in the Millennium Development Goals. Both events affirmed the imperative for greater solidarity worldwide and shared responsibility in meeting and addressing the challenges confronting all countries and all peoples in this twenty-first century.

A Backward Glance At The Future

The field of development administration was largely contingent on a seemingly inescapable dependence on exogenous models and ideas. Yet a critical mass of third world scholars and researchers has emerged questioning the foundations of the common wisdom under which they were trained. This second generation of intellectuals has emphasized the interdisciplinary and cultural dimensions of the study of comparative and development administration. These individuals have also been critical of ethnocentricity of the new public management surrogate.

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Dwivedi, O. P., and Jorge Nef. “Crises and Continuities in Development Theory and Administration: First and Third World Perspectives.” Public Administration and Development 2 (1982): 59–77.
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