Guest editorial: Rethinking the state of the administrative state: Is the state back in?

Abstract

Introduction The emergence and the frequency of what may be described as monumental crises, such as devasting hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic, their impact on human health and economic development and the need to forcefully address them have brought forth or resurrected the idea of the administrative state and its role in governance as broadly defined once again (Lin et al., 2020). The policies implemented in the name of the NPM led to the erosion of the institutions of the administrative state through policies that sought to cut social programmes and public sector jobs, through the sale of public assets and privatization (Cordelli, 2020), along with a more general weakening of regulation and the underfunding of public infrastructures, particularly healthcare and emergency management systems (Hood and Scott, 1996;Tomic and Heims, 2022). [...]the essence of this essay is to understand the administrative state and the various trajectories it has gone through up to now. [...]while it is clear that the state's role in almost all nations has continued to experience dramatic shifts, especially in dealing with wicked problems, the need to understand this dramatic shift from a more general perspective continues to be obscured in the current discussion. [...]as argued, there is the need to look at the role of the administrative state in a more holistic perspective rather than the current obsession to examine it mainly from how the state has evolved under the COVID-19 pandemic.