The scope of public administration has in recent years been stretched to accommodate an expanding view of the components of social and economic progress. The principal foreign aid donors now consider neither instrumental eciency nor rational economic policies to be sucient to initiate or sustain development. What is urgently required is improved `governance' that protects human and property rights and mitigates societal conยฏicts, thereby insuring the political stability and security of investments and enterprise that facilitate economic activity and the emergence of democratic institutions. While state power must be constrained by law, government administration must at the same time enhance its capacities for policy-making, regulation and service delivery that are indispensable to economic progress.
The implications of these frontiers in development administration are addressed in this mini-symposium. Professor John Montgomery explores the role of public administration in expanding and safeguarding human rights; Professor Carl Baar discusses the administrative challenges to consolidating the rule of law; Professor Milton Esman and Dr Deryck Brown address the means by which public administration may mitigate the ethnic conยฏicts that threaten the peace and prospects for development of numerous low-income countries.
These explicitly political concerns are certain to outlast the current enchantment with anti-statist ideology that ยฎlled the political vacuum in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire. They must therefore be incorporated into the corpus of administrative theory and the methodologies of administrative practice. They create fresh needs for the recruitment, training and reward systems of public ocials and for the stang of development assistance agencies.