Comparative Public Management
Spring 2010
Public management concerns how government agencies do their jobs of providing services to citizens, from courts and police forces to schools to health clinics to central banks and finance ministries. While public management may seem like a dry subject, it is in fact extremely critical to good development outcomes. For example, a huge amount of money is being spent today on fighting HIV/AIDS and other diseases in Africa; but most African countries do not have high-quality public health systems. Both governments and donors thus face the problem of how to actually spend money and implement plans. Without strong public administration in the recipient country, donors are tempted to build parallel systems that in time have the paradoxical effect of weakening long-term government capacity. Similarly, investors are not going to entertain long-term investment projects if they feel their property rights will not be respected and protected by the court system, or if they have to pay bribes to do business. Strengthening public management has thus been at the forefront of the development agenda for the past decade now. This course will approach the problem of public management in developing countries from a comparative perspective. Much of the existing public management literature has been developed by academics and practitioners in developed countries and focuses on developed country experiences. Developing countries face much different environments in which the levels of resources and human capital that exist in richer societies simply aren’t present, and where institutions are weak or in some cases nonexistent. The challenge is thus to apply what we know in theory about public management and apply it in ways that will be useful in reforming the administrative systems of poor countries. The course will be divided between discussions of theory, lectures, and case studies. We will have a series of guest lecturers with practical experience in public management reform in developing countries who will focus their talks on practical cases with which they have dealt. We will use the theory to place cases in a broader conceptual context, but also revisit the theory in light of the cases we have discussed. Couse web sit on Sakai (available only to registered students). Course syllabus | 
