Teaching international comparative public management through a development lens

The article tackles the question, how to provide students with a comparative orientation to public administration. We eschew the older tradition of comparing major systems such British parliamentary system or French bureaucratic approaches to organizations’ structure. Rather, we seek to understand public administration in countries with different cultures, histories, and political regimes by focusing on international development. Our students are drawn from the Master of Public Administration degree program and the Master of International Affairs degree program. What unites them is an interest in international affairs and the desire to work internationally; international students take what they learn and apply it in their home countries. We ground the course on a model of international development with a strong focus on development in governance. We spend the first third of the class creating a development lens for understanding global practices in public management in which they use what they learned in the first part of the course to analyze a range of public management issues within governmental institutions and/or in working in the nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organization sectors. We use detailed case studies drawn from several case data banks to apply some of the core concepts of public administration such as leadership, stakeholder analysis, complexity, and implementation to development challenges such as fiscal issues, poverty alleviation, interorganizational collaboration, and human rights. We do this with a range of in-class exercises and assignments that students do out of class. One goal we have is to provide students with knowledge and skills to enhance their ability to work internationally since many have gone on to work for donor and various implementing organizations in international development. We believe that this is a reasonable measure of success of the approach we have taken to comparative public administration.