Challenges in Public Administration from Developing Nations

When a developmental creed emerged in the West, it posited that in order to attain development, a country’s administrative structure should conform to the standards of the most advanced industrial societies. The key issue, then, was the transformation of the existing traditional machinery into the new entity. This was to be accomplished through administrative development: the modernization of the public service machinery through external inducement, transfer of technology, and training by so-called foreign experts. For this task, various prescriptive models were advocated by the Western experts. This tradition was based on the dichotomy between politics and administration; it was a system that relied on hierarchy, unity of command, political neutrality, recruitment and promotion on the merit principle, public service accountability, objectivity, and probity.