Public administration managers are confronted with new and highly complex challenges emerging at a rapid rate. This situation requires a reimagining of public administration education to prepare public administration managers to capably deal with these challenges. While the Master of Public Administration (MPA) is globally used as vehicle for…

Research on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has tended to have a bad reputation within the field of public administration. In this manuscript, I discuss the issue of impactful research within the field and provide an argument for why we should be focusing more on pedagogical research than more traditional avenues. Not only does…

Drawing on insights from philosophy and theology, we explore the relationship between religion, data and global education policy through an analysis of the career of Sir Michael Barber, widely regarded as an authority on the reform of public services and an influential policy entrepreneur. The analysis provides a novel perspective which…

Courses and training in public decision-making have often disappeared from Public Administration curricula. This paper argues that this is unfortunate as skills therein are severely needed to steer developments towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Whereas some see this as a macro development that befalls countries, this paper argues…

The COVID-19 pandemic forced surprised governments worldwide to act fast and decisively, often revealing lack of preparation for this kind of situation. However, such crises are expected to occur far more frequently than ever before. To keep societies prospering, governments, administrations, and civil servants will have to adapt quickly and…

Traditionally, civil servants and public officials are highly educated and have strong administrative expertise. Public financial managers have been regarded as 'guardians of the public purse', who have solid budgeting, accounting and auditing skills. However, the development of 'mega-trends' such as digitalization and e-government affect the…

Reflection can play a critical role in an educational leader's capacity to sustain and improve their leadership practices. Reflection in the form of writing allows leaders to slow down and carefully attend to their own thinking before facilitating collective thinking and decision-making in those they lead. Though educational leaders are often…

In this symposium, attention is primarily focused on ethics education in public administration programs in colleges and universities. We argue that teaching ethics should be not only limited to specific ethics courses in higher education nor just embedded as an element in various core courses in public administration programs, but also anchored in…

Research has documented that applied projects that are experiential and grounded in the course contents offer effective hands-on experience to students to understand the course materials and apply their learnings in a meaningful way. Experiential learning is particularly relevant to Master of Public Administration Programs (MPA), which are usually…

Master of Public Administration (MPA) alumni face increasingly diverse and global professional expectations. Public affairs specialists generally go on to manage complex partnerships that involve a wide array of participants. Public administration education ought to do its part to ensure these graduates succeed. In this sense, we offer comparative…

Public administration educators in the United States have renewed their interest in incorporating an international perspective into their teaching. Why is this perspective important for students and how can educators integrate it meaningfully? In this article, I provide an argument for the internationalization of public administration curricula,…

Despite the fact that our knowledge on how policies are designed has substantially improved during the last two decades, prescriptive literature on policy formulation remains largely disconnected from these new findings. The article examines five major assumptions upon which policy formulation is still predominantly based: (a) there is one way…

When crises occur, revisiting given knowledge and practices seems sensible and necessary. For instance, the recent financial crisis in 2008 lead to questioning the role played by financial institutions and business schools in precipitating the crisis by allowing questionable professional ethics to go unchallenged. There is a current crisis in…

Public policy is frequently characterised as a sub-discipline of political science which is practically oriented and concerned with what government does and does not do. Further, policy analysis can also be characterised as concerned with either the analysis 'of policy' or 'for policy'. This clearly has implications for the design and delivery of…

This article investigates transformations in public service education over the past 50 years, specifically: How have organizational forms evolved, and what lessons can we draw from that evolution? The organizational form construct originates in population ecology theory. We draw from a variety of evidentiary sources in answering the research…