Globalizing Public Administration: Today's Research and Tomorrow's Agenda

Abstract

What is the relationship between public administration scholarship and the study of developing countries? This article answers this question by presenting the intellectual history of administrative studies of the global South and by examining recent empirical studies of developing country administration. The results suggest that administrative research on the developing world published in leading international publications has become a small‐scale, disparate, descriptive, qualitative, and noncomparative subfield dominated by researchers from the global North. This empirical finding provides a platform to end a false North–South administrative dichotomy and advance a vision for public administration as a global social science.