Overcoming ethnocentrism in public administration:

A plea for a truly global discipline

Sabina Schnell
Assistant Professor, Syracuse University
Submission for the Minnowbrook 50th Anniversary Conference

“Of ourselves, so long as we only know ourselves, we know nothing” (Wilson, 1887: 220).

As populism is on the rise everywhere, so too are nationalism and xenophobia. Does this matter
for public administration? Not if we narrowly conceptualize the goal of PA as apolitically
“managing” public policy with maximum efficiency, and public administration research as the
non-normative search for scientific “universal” truths. But this is exactly what the first
Minnowbrook conference and many scholars since then have argued against. Ignoring values
other than efficiency reinforces patterns of marginalization and oppression that have always
been present in any “administrative state”, but that have been exacerbated lately by the rise of
populism and global resurgence of authoritarianism.

What if anything can PA do in this context? At the very least, increased global engagement
seems now more necessary than ever. Calls to make public administration more comparative
and more internationally relevant are not new (e.g., Perry, 2016; Roberts, 2013; Riggs, 1991;
Wilson, 1887). Yet articles with a comparative or international focus in top PA journals are still
few and far in-between, and focused mostly on countries in North America and Western
Europe, or, even more narrowly, on what Al Roberts has called “AUSCANZUKUS”.1

What explains this ethnocentrism of PA? Old and new PA paradigms have the potential to be
more comparative and international. Yet, so far, this potential is not fully realized. The
“Simonian”, purportedly non-normative approach, currently quasi-reborn under the mantle of
behavioral public administration, tends to focus on micro-level, individual behavior. By
prioritizing rigor, it deemphasizes questions and places for which “hard” data is more difficult to
obtain and analyze. By focusing on micro-level behavior, it ignores the political, institutional,
social systems within which public administration is embedded, that is, the “large forces” that
shape administrative development and behavior. To increase its international and comparative
relevance, research in this tradition needs to engage with and theorize more the meso and
macro “context” of individual behavior, preempting uncritical generalization of findings by
explicitly assessing also the external validity of the studies.

The Waldonian approach explicitly emphasizes and embraces the democratic values on which
PA is or should be built. Yet, overcoming ethnocentrism within this stream also remains
challenging – not because such values are necessarily country-specific, but because the
“demos” can easily be conceptualized as “our people”, and the values treated as de-

1
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States. http://governancejournal.net/advice-to-
authors/

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contextualized and independent of the larger systems in which they are embedded. A solely
value-centered approach also risks sliding into naïve idealism and ignoring a main lesson of
administrative history – that even if public administrative is (today) meant to serve the public, it
has also always been an instrument to rule it. As Fukuyama (2011, 2014) argues, well-
functioning (modern) states are those that succeed in balancing democracy, bureaucracy, and
the rule of law. A truly global PA discipline will have to grapple with even more challenging
normative questions about the role and the power of the administrative state in a “good”
society. Again, understanding how values are realized or not in administrative law,
administrative structure and administrative practice requires a more explicit and sustained
engagement with said “context”. Such understanding can perhaps help us answer one of the
most important questions for a globalized PA: how do we engage with and defend democratic
values in non-democratic contexts and in an increasingly authoritarian world?

In both traditions, the neglect of “context” is also the result of shallow engagement of PA with
other disciplines, and increasingly “closed” and self-referential PA scholarship. The behavioral
movement has brought a welcome reevaluation of the importance of psychology for PA at the
micro-level. Yet, as Roberts (2013) has argued, not only has the study of large forces in PA been
ceded to other disciplines, such as political science, but the findings from these disciplines have
not found their way back into PA scholarship. At the very least, if PA scholarship wants to go
beyond the “West” or the “North” (read: rich countries), it needs to engage better and learn
more from development studies – a truly interdisciplinary field that has been grappling with
issues of “good governance” in developing countries for a long time.

What then is to be done to make PA more internationally aware and relevant?

• Remember why we “care” about “other” places. One argument for increased
internationalization of PA is a desire to speak to “great problems” the world faces. While
desirable, “great problem” thinking risks generating two fallacies: the “great powers” fallacy
and the “conflict or poverty porn” fallacy. The “great powers fallacy” argues that only the
administrative systems of those countries that pose a threat to US global supremacy are
worthy of study. Conversely, the “conflict or poverty porn” fallacy implies that the focus
should be on those places that face the biggest challenges, such as fragile or failed states. In
combination, the argument would be that only those places are worthy of study that pose a
security threat to the US. Such thinking remains highly ethnocentric, leaves out a large
number of “in-between” developing or emerging countries, and ignores the main scientific
reason why the study of different administrative systems is important: because it offers
more variability in terms of institutional, political, and other country-level structural factors
that shape public administration, and thus can help build and strengthen theory that allows
“us” to also better understand our own administrative systems.

• Don’t be afraid of globalization. Globalization – broadly understood as increased global

integration and internationalization (or supra-nationalization) of policy-making – has been
much maligned in PA (Farazmand, 2012). This is in part due to the Washington Consensus
“hangover” of the 1990s, including its “privatization, liberalization, and stabilization”

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 mantra, and the presumed – but not entirely borne out – spread of New Public
Management (NPM) around the world. But while the Washington Consensus might have
been global in spread, its origin is not - as the name suggests. The same can be said of the
NPM approach, which arose and diffused mostly among Anglo-Saxon countries (Pollitt &
Bouckaert, 2004). Yet, the Washington Consensus and NPM are not the only byproducts of
globalization. Global policy and practice diffusion has included political and administrative
innovations that are arguably (normatively) “good”, such as the spread of the right to
information around the world. Globalization has also facilitated diffusion of “good
practices” from the “South” to the “North” – the most famous example being the spread of
participatory budgeting from Brazil to many countries, including developed ones. Thus,
global integration is neither inherently good nor inherently bad by itself – it depends on
how it is managed. PA has had remarkably little to say on the potential for good of
globalization.

• Be humble. Leveraging the good of globalization requires humility and self-reflection among
those who have the greatest influence in the field – i.e., North American and Western
European scholars and practitioners. The implicit assumption that “the West knows best”,
the lack of reflection about the “larger forces” that shape PA, the lack of attention to
administrative history, and the lack of a truly comparative framework have all contributed
to a rather uncritical advocacy for NPM-type practices in contexts where they are not
suitable. While patterns of (subnational) policy diffusion have been amply studied in PA,
there is currently less research not only on how policies and practices diffuse beyond the
developed world, but also on how they can be adapted to local contexts so that they
strengthen the quality and responsiveness of public administration rather than weaken it. In
development studies there is currently a revolution of sorts underway, where academics,
and, to a lesser degree, practitioners, are moving away from “one-size-fits-all”, “best-
practice”, “solution-driven” approaches to public sector reform, towards “problem” and
“process driven” approaches that seek to help local practitioners identify local reform needs
and find local solutions to address these needs (Andrews, 2013). Yet, a purely process-
oriented approach risks falling in a different trap: that of overplaying the uniqueness of
places and problems, underplaying the lessons that can be learned from comparative
research, and “forgetting” the importance of administrative systems and broader, macro-
structural factors that shape reform processes and outcomes. In other words, a process-
based, localized approach to public sector reform should not detract from efforts to
develop better and more portable theories of public administration. At the same time, “we”
– scholars and practitioners from the “North” or “West” – should also admit that our
knowledge about what is translatable across contexts and what not is still quite limited, and
we also have a lot to learn by studying administrative systems and practices of a larger
varieties of countries.

• Build bridges in terms of both scholars and scholarship. The number of foreign-born or
“international” students has been steadily increasing in PA programs. Yet, only a minority of
PA schools have an explicit international focus, or offer courses on comparative or
international public administration (Manoharan, Mirbel & Carrizales, 2018). Many

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 international PA PhD graduates remain and go on to become faculty in US PA schools. They
represent a potentially rich source of international expertise that can be leveraged to
internationalize PA scholarship and increase its comparative focus. Yet, even for these
scholars, the incentives to focus on domestic PA issues – from data availability to ease of
publishing to implicit biases – are very strong. More explicit commitment and
encouragement of international and comparative scholarship from leading journals and
editors could go a long way in encouraging these, often young, scholars to veer off the
beaten path a bit.

• Listen and speak to a broader range of practitioners. Understandably, most PA

communities target their own national and local policy-makers. Since the US, UK, and a few
Northern European countries dominate the academic PA community both in terms of
schools and in terms of journals and research, the literature is geared towards (domestic)
decision-makers in these countries. “Development administration” is a somewhat neglected
sub-field of public administration in the US. Much of it is targeted towards or linked to US –
and to a lesser degree IOs and a few other donor countries – foreign aid goals and practices
(Brinkerhoff, 2008; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2010). Little PA research takes the
perspective or speaks directly to decision-makers, administrators, and citizens of developing
countries, without the “donor gaze”.

In conclusion, if we, as a community of scholars, follow the suggestions above - manage to

expand our geographic and theoretical horizons, be humbler about what we know but more
ambitious about what we want to know, and encourage the potential “bridge-builders” and
“boundary-spanners” in our midst - we might stand a chance to enrich not only administrative
practice everywhere, but also administrative theory here, at “home”.

References

Andrews, M. (2013). The limits of institutional reform in development: Changing rules for
realistic solutions. Cambridge University Press.

Brinkerhoff, D. W. (2008). The state and international development management: Shifting tides,
changing boundaries, and future directions. Public Administration Review, 68(6), 985-1001.

Brinkerhoff, J. M., & Brinkerhoff, D. W. (2010). International development management: A

northern perspective. Public Administration and Development: The International Journal of
Management Research and Practice, 30(2), 102-115.

Farazmand, A. (2012). The future of public administration: Challenges and opportunities—A

critical perspective. Administration & Society, 44(4), 487-517.

Fukuyama, F. (2011). The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French
Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Fukuyama, F. (2014). Political order and political decay: From the industrial revolution to the
globalization of democracy. Macmillan.

Manning, N. (2001). The legacy of new public management in developing countries.

International Review of Administrative Sciences, 67(2), 297-312.

Manoharan, A. P., Mirbel, W., & Carrizales, T. J. (2018). Global comparative public
administration: Are graduate programs responding to the call?. Teaching Public
Administration, 36(1), 34-49.

Riggs, F. W. (1991). Guest editorial: Public administration: A comparativist framework. Public

Administration Review, 51(6), 473-477.

Perry, J. L. (2016). Building global public administration knowledge public administration

review. Public Administration Review,76(4), 533; 533-534.

Pollitt, C., & Bouckaert, G. (2004). Public management reform: A comparative analysis. Oxford
University Press, USA.

Wilson, W. (1887). The study of administration. Political science quarterly, 2(2), 197-222.