This time it is `The New Public Administration: Moving into the 21st Century', a theme most relevant and timely as we approach the new century and millennium.
The 21st Century will be a century characterized by electronic communities in a globalized world. We in Asia have already had a foretaste of what is to come and are still reeling from the eects of sampling a globalized international market in which massive amounts of funds can and will be moved from country to country and from continent to continent with such ease and speed that reaction time is reduced to zero. Thinking is rendered anachronistic and obviously planning for the future is quite impossible. The gut has taken over from the brain.
Besides ยฎnancial capital, the 21st Century will witness similar cross-border movements of other economic factors, such as workers and professionals. The use of electronic communication technologies may allow workers to reside in one country and work in another. But eventually they will move from country to country in a borderless world. There will be no single-ethnic country. All will be multiracial like Malaysia. The cosy insulated single-ethnic nations must learn to adjust to rainbowcoloured polyglot populations.
Until we form that amalgam, the weak and the disadvantaged will be pitted against the strong and the powerful. If developing countries are to survive at all and they are to be given the fundamental right to develop and aspire to attain developed status, new rules and codes of conduct for all participants must be formulated and duly enforced. The law of the jungle does not ยฎt into the framework of good governance. Therefore the architecture of governance will have to be re-examined so that technological progress and the accompanying new value systems will not result in the collapse of Governments and governance.
When we talk about governance, we speak of the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority to manage a nation's aairs. This deยฎnition broadly includes the complex array of mechanisms, processes, relationships and institutions through which citizens manage aairs involving public life. However, current conditions have shown that governance is no longer the exclusive domain of the state.