Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on Public Policy

Over the last six months I have written a fair bit on changing approaches to public administration and their impact on the development of public policy.

I am interested in the topic in a personal sense because I have worked within the public sector as well as consulting to Government organisations.

I am also interested in a professional sense because I feel that the importation into public administration of models developed in other areas and in particular management has had a negative impact on the development of public policy because of a failure to recognise the original limitations.

As an example here, in my post Problems with Performance Pay I pointed to some of the problems associated with the attempt by the Australian Minister for Education to introduce performance pay, a concept drawn from the management arena, for teachers.

One of the difficulties with the blog format, and conversely one of its strengths, is the way that posts move around a topic and also evolve with time. The strength lies in the free form offered to thought. The difficulty lies in the way in which the evolution of thought, the way in which ideas and evidence support each other, is concealed from all but the very persistent reader.

There are not too many of the last. While some of the visitors to this post do look at multiple pages, the average number of page views per visitor is just under two. Life is too short for people to track through a range of posts to establish connecting threads, even with search facilities.

As a way of challenging this limitation, I began the process a little while ago of drawing together my various posts on public administration across blogs into a single series of posts on the Ndarala Group blog, doing a little editing at the same time to draw out the linkages. My hope is that this will then present the work as a more integrated whole.

Depending on the results here, I will then look at replicating them in the standard web format because this makes it still easier for the interested reader.

For those who are interested, the introductory post can be found here. To make navigation easier, I am putting a full list of posts at the end of each individual post so that the reader can more easily go onto the next post. So from the introductory post you can follow through the five post so far put up in the series.