Abstract
Almost all governments of the world, regardless of their nature, have one common feature – that of public administration. Public administration constitutes a process or responsibility of determining policies and programs of the various governments. As a special system linked to governance, public administration is involved in planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling numerous government functions.
In its operation, public administration functions may be practiced at the central, intermediate, and local levels of government and as a result of existence of relationships between various levels of government, public administration is compounded with numerous problems.
In most cases, public administration is carried out in a more unstable environment and factors such as politics, changing power relationships, economic swings and volatile social issues affect the field in varied ways. In broad sense, public administration can be thought as the process or activity of organization and management of people and resources in order to accomplish the objectives of government.
The bulk of this paper will dwell on case analysis where issues with regard to public administration will be analyzed in the perspectives of theories and principles of public administration.
Case Analysis
A lot of literature view public administration to largely involve coordination of individual and group efforts in order to carry out a particular public policy.
As one of its characteristics, public administration reflects or is occupied with the daily work of governments, utilizing group effort in public setting and further public administration assumes a vital role in formulating of public policy, thus constitute part of the political process (Ginandjar and Deddy, 2006).
Characterization of public administration does not stop here, for instance, other writers have described public administration to be largely concerned with how political elites and rulers in government together with non-political public sector administrators device policy, sustain the machinery of government in an effort to make sure various policies are put into practice and succeed (Ginandjar and Deddy, 2006).
Moreover, public administration does not function or operate in independence, but rather it is intertwined into other fields of politics, law, business, economics and many more.
Origin of public administration can be traced to the midst to buttress the field with knowledge, which could help the government respond to the various social needs that were brought about by processes of democratization, urbanization, industrialization, population growth and globalization (Raadschelders, 2003).
The response of public administration to the various social needs of the government has been effective, but what emerges from analysis of the concept of public administration is that choice of particular public policy is usually political, which is further enhanced and served by administrative structures and processes in implementation of the policy.
Study and analysis of public administration encompasses numerous issues such as organizational structure, policy and decision-making styles, the management of human and financial resources and so on (Raadschelders, 2003).
Case Study: Summary and analysis
The presented case is about a dialogue of three senior committee members: committee chair, the assistant secretary, and the bureau chief. As it is evident, two different political views are represented with committee chair coming from an opposite political part to that of the assistant secretary. The concerns of the committee chair are on the move by the administration to reduce the budget for the Indian Health Program.
Assistant asserts that the move was taken in accordance realization that the needs of the Indians could be met through other mechanisms available. This leads to the committee chair disputing these, indicating that an extensive expert research had indicated that this could not function well to the Indians.
The Bureau Chief who is the head of the program when asked about his position, he clearly states that his action and overall position are in accordance with the position of the administration. When asked by the committee chair to reveal the amount located to the program during the current financial year, he is reluctant to do so citing that he is not authorized to discuss matters of internal budget requests.
Assistant Secretary makes it clear that various programs submit their budgets and it was the role of the administration to evaluate and prepare appropriate budget for the various submitted programs. In addition, in an attempt to bring the discussion to a halt, the Ranking Minority Member advised the committee that since the budget was yet to be submitted, as a committee, they were not entitled to discuss it.
This dialogue reveals the various aspects and processes in public administration. First, public administration is an administrative organ where the decision-making role rests with the government. At the same time, public administration involves different actors who in one way or the other would want to influence key policy formulation.
Further, public administration is seen to reflect bureaucratic nature where there is hierarchical in decision making, which has to be followed and observed.
Moreover, public administration manifest itself as a complex process, especially in decision making and finally, as an organ public administration appears to operative within specified premises of ethical requirements. Therefore, the rest of the paper will explore the concept of public administration within this perspective.
Public policy
As it has widely come to be known and used, public policy may refer to particular policies made and implemented by the government with aim to achieve certain set goals. Hence, government uses public policies as means to attain precise and specific objectives of the government (Naidu, 2005).
A public policy may largely emanate from health, education, rural development, urban development, or even industrial development and in all the cases, the policies will be shaped in accordance to the available government budget to attain broad goal of the policy.
In most cases, public policies are concerned with efforts by the government to provide goods and services to the identified people in need and as such, public policies largely are concerned with government’s behaviors (Naidu, 2005). In designing public policy, various authorities of the government are involved in the process, such as: legislators, executives, administrators, judges and many more.
In its nature, policy-making can bee described as a continuous process, which always occurs in the determination of major objectives while at the same time, also occurs in the continuous adaptation of the existing policies to the problems that the government may be facing.
In many cases, the current policies may be reformulated with regard to experiences with their implementation nature; hence room is presented for new policies to be developed based on the old ones in order to meet the changing needs of the society, a fact that makes policies to be dynamic in nature.
Government/Administration and public policy making
Public policy, as earlier seen is implicated in governance. Primarily, to ensure a public policy functions to meet its objectives, three things are important. First, the need to ascertain the costs and benefits associated with the implementation of public policies.
Second, ascertain and have concise knowledge about the effect of public policies on the lives of the people in various spheres. Third, make precise consideration of the extent to which a policy has the ability to cause change in the desired direction of the various spheres of life’s social, economic and political (Naidu, 2005).
The government and larger administrative unit involvement in public policy is an issue that has occupied enormous amount of time for many researchers and professionals of public administration. For instance, in 1887, Woodrow Wilson asserted that the main aim and concern of public administration is to facilitate the implementation of public laws generated and designed by the political system (Naidu, 2005).
According to these views, Woodrow, therefore, regarded public policy-making to be purely a political function, whereas the duty of enforcing the policy was left to the administration. Elaborating the views of Woodrow, Frank Goodnow (1900) noted that politics had largely to do with policies while the execution of these policies was the work and duty of the administration (cited in Naidu, 2005).
The period after the Second World War saw the emergence of classical doctrines writings, which largely discredited the earlier policy-administration dichotomy. To this group administration could not be divorced from politics (Naidu, 2005) and that the process of making and implementing policy are purely intertwined.
According to Appleby, the fact is that public administration is involved in policy-making and an administrator act as an influential advocate of the political approach to public administration (cited in Naidu, 2005).
He summarizes this in succinct words that, “administrators are continually determining what the law is, what it means in terms of action, what the rights of parties are with respect both to transactions in process and transactions in prospect; administrators also participate in another way in the making of policy for the future, they formulate recommendations for legislations, and this is part of the function of policy-making” (cited in Naidu, 2005, p.62).
This statement shows how key administrators plays role in formulation of public policy.
Key actors in public policy making
For a long time, public policy content and its institution characteristic have been products of the association and interaction between the political-administrative authorities on one side and the social groups that have the capacity to cause or support the negative effects of the collective problem that the larger public policy seeks to address (Knoepfel, Larrue, Varone and Hill, 2007).
Lastly, the beneficiaries of the public policy constitute a third category of actors. These various and different actors possess different values and interests, which they transform into a game-like that they eventually want to play in the field of policy-making and implementation based on their interests.
The actors will always pursue their various interests on policy-making and implementation based on the resources they succeed to mobilize in order to be in a position to defend their positions, of course with respect to the objectives, instruments and development processes involved in a public intervention measure (Knoepfel, Larrue, Varone and Hill, 2007).
The ‘games’ the actors involve in has the potential to affect the relevant content of the public policy and also the procedural and organizational modes of its formulation and subsequent implementation.
The context of public policy-making environment
The policy-making process and it subsequent implementation process do not operate in vacuum, but rather are affected by both internal and external environment. McCurdy (1977) states that environment constitutes an “area in which the government and its institutions strive to function effectively and efficiently” (cited in Fox, Bayat and Ferreira, 2007, p.29).
Swella, Burger, Fox and Muller (1996) observed that key public resources do not function or operate in vacuum, but rather they are utilized efficiently in order to pursue policy objectives while at the same time various variables influence the management of these resources (cited in Fox, Bayat and Ferreira, 2007).
As it can be seen, environment can refer to much more than just the actual physical environment where in this case it involves the internal environment consisting of: suppliers, competitors, and regulators whereas the external environment of the policy-making process may include: political component, social component, economic component, technological component, cultural component, physical component and religious component (Fox, Bayat and Ferreira, 2007).
On its part the external environment is what affects policy-making and implementation processes a lot. For example, external environment constitute numerous characteristics, which have the capacity to affect the policy-making process. These characteristics include turbulence, hostility, diversity, complexity, restrictiveness, and the overall state of the economy (Fox, Bayat, and Ferreira, 2007).
Clash of values in the administration of public policy
Gary Bryner observes that public administration role is to execute in form of implementation the policies formulated by the government (Peters and Pierre, 2007). The efficiency on the part of the government to achieve the objectives of a particular policy depends on the capability of the public administrators. At the same time, other factors are vital to achieve these objectives, such as commitment by the legislature and authority to authorize key resources of the policy goals.
Further political decisions are vital, especially those concerned with priorities and tradeoffs among the competing needs. As a fact expectations on the part of the government to initiate wide range of policies and the constraints public administrators have to go through in realizing the goals of policies have sometimes resulted into clashes of values.
For instance, some policies reflect political arrangements that implicate bureaucracy sometimes inconsistent to the strongly held values of democratic accountability and representation, while others are generally problematic (Peters and Pierre, 2007).
In nature, public administration attachment to politics makes the policy-making process to be dependent on politics of the day. On overall assessment of the outcomes of public policies has the ability to shape and influence the way the public will think about public administration.
For example, those who get convinced that outcomes are positive are likely to support and defend the existing bureaucracies, while those with a more critical view of the outcome will agitate for the existing bureaucracies to be changed (Peters and Pierre, 2007).
Frequently public administration of most public corporations will be termed to be ineffective, unable to provide solution to the various existing problems but what must be remembered is that bureaucratic success or failure depends a lot on the ultimate function and distribution of power in the political economy of which they are part (Peters and Pierre, 2007).
While the focus may concentrate on particular public organization, it needs to be remembered that questions of administrative structure, bureaucratic behaviors, process, management and even inter-governmental politics, public administrators cannot be regarded to be very divorced from the wide context of the politics.
Decision making in public-policy making process
Better public policy has largely been viewed to possess the following characteristics: they are easy to analyze, they always have transparent and legitimate decision-making processes and are open to discussion of issues (Peters and Pierre, 2007). Better analysis has to do with good research work before a particular policy can be adopted.
With regard to transparent and legitimate decision-making processes, a mere analysis has the inability of providing the right answers and even in real sense there exist no right answers to policy questions. Generally, each policy demonstrates its strengths and weaknesses and further each policy has varying degrees in terms of affecting the society.
For a policy to be legitimate, it will largely depend on the legitimacy of the decision-making process where all the affected parties and groups need to have access to the decision-making process and their opinions need to be factored either directly or indirectly.
To this extend, an effective and functional public policy should reflect the needs and overall desires of the larger public, whereby the public should also express confidence in the decision-making process, which therefore need to be open and transparent.
The third concept postulates that the public cannot operate without adequate information and as such, they need to be provided with basic facts about specific issues. The issues should be discussed and scrutinized since it is only from challenging and defending principles, theories, and positions that true and rational decisions will be found.
Conclusion
Public policy-making process has been viewed to be a long process that has to be undertaken in phases. In essence, for public policy to become functional it must be remembered that rule-of-thump technique is not the way to go. The policy-making process should assume both a top-down and a bottom-up process. Further, sometimes, public policies will demonstrate to be clashing with values in their administration.
This may be due to political reasons or other related reasons available in the contextual environment in which the policy is operating.
As it aims and struggles to function independently, public administration cannot divorce itself from the political bureaucracies, which generally allocates the necessary resources to implement the policies. In such cases, proper decision-making processes that include key actors are seen to contribute to effectiveness of policy in realization of the broad set goals.
Therefore, observation made is that, as much various interest groups intertwined and operating from different political backgrounds will want to influence the policy-making process, it is important to remember that any policy should be in a position to serve the needs and desires of the affected people and identifying the needs should assume a continuous research process of assessing how well a particular policy can serve or fulfill the needs of the affected people.
References
Fox, W., Bayat, S. and, Ferreira, N. (2007). A Guide to Managing Public Policy. South Africa, Juta and Company Ltd. Web.
Ginandjar, K., and Deddy, S. B. (2006). The Theory of Public Administration. Web.
Knoepfel, P., Larrue, C., Varone, F. and Hill, M. (2007). Public policy analysis. UK, The Policy Press. Web.
Naidu, S. P. (2005). Public Administration: Concepts and Theories. New Delhi, New Age International. Web.
Peters, B. G. and, Pierre, J. (2007). Handbook of public administration. CA, SAGE. Web.
Raadschelders, J. C. N. (2003). Government: A Public Administration Perspective. NY, M.E. Sharpe. Web.