Serving the State : Global Public Administration Education and Training - v. 1 : Anglo American Tradition

This text explores the patterns of education and training for public administration in a global context, looking at how educators and trainers in the field are focussing their activities.

The importance of improving public management is widely accepted as a goal, how to achieve this is more problematic.

As the nature of public administration changes, so the curriculum of the academic discipline must be re-focused to remain relevant.

This text seeks to analyze the educational and training responses to the changes taking place in public administration, and offer a global overview developed from a series of specialist in-country local perspectives.

What is revealed is a complex pattern of changing educational rhetoric which is not always reflected in classroom practice.

Some contributors report on the insurmountable barriers to much needed curriculum change, which bear down on public administration trainers and educators.

Others report on curriculum innovation which has outpaced the employment needs of practitioners, who then turn to a call for a more traditional curriculum. The studies which follow raise questions about the nature and context of local factors in shaping the delivery of the public administration curriculum.

Firstly, however, the text places the concerns within the historical perspective of public administration and training, and the contemporary influences which have engulfed the practice and study of the discipline in recent times.