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…

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…

Public administration education is a key instrument to address emerging public administration challenges. Ethiopia started public administration education in the 1950s, and currently, 13 public universities are offering bachelor programs in public administration. Nevertheless, PA program learning outcome achievements are not been studied, and…

This study aims to explore whether an introductory undergraduate course in Public Administration might be an appropriate educational tool for enhancing public service motivation (PSM) among undergraduate students. A quasi-experimental design involves surveying participants both before and after the intervention (taking an Introduction to Public…

A substantial amount of scholarly work focuses on conceptualizing, theorizing and studying the policy capacity of governments. Yet, guidance for practitioners on developing policy capacity training programs is lacking. In this article, I reflect on my experience as a public servant in the provincial government of Prince Edward Island where I…

Public administration is struggling to contend with a substantial shift in practice fueled by the accelerating adoption of information technology. New skills, competencies and pedagogies are required by the field to help overcome the data-skills gap. As a means to address these deficiencies, we introduce the Data Science Literacy Framework, a…

Teaching public administration theory and linking it to practice can be challenging; yet are central goals to MPA programs. Using relevant examples that students can relate to is instrumental in achieving the pedagogical goals of linking theory to practice and achieving the NASPAA competencies. "New Amsterdam" is used as a case study for…

The rationale of this study is first hinged on research deficit in topic difficulty in the public administration curriculum in African universities. Further, there is no single study in the humanities, particularly public administration (PA), that has explored the efficacy of the Culturo-Techno-Contextual Approach (CTCA) in easing learning…

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…

In this conceptual paper, we aim to revisit key research themes in contemporary organizational institutionalism and by doing this, redirect attention of scholars in public administration towards the most promising domains of application of institutional theory. We propose to shift attention from enabling and power-induced framing of institutional…

On the 75th anniversary of Herbert A Simon's "Proverbs of Administration," it is fitting to consider its place in the public administration canon, with an eye to contemporary realities. In Proverbs, Simon interrogated prevailing mid-century "principles of public administration." But even as he reduced in rank each…

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…

Case studies provide helpful teaching tools to capture the complexity of administrative problems from an action-oriented perspective. With increasingly complex policy problems at hand, more interdisciplinary, interactive, and discursive approaches to teaching are also in demand. However, the case method offers a broad variety of options for…

Journalists, politicians, watchdog institutions, and public administration scholars devote considerable energy to identifying and dissecting failures in government. Studies and case-studies of policy, organizational, and institutional failures in the public sector figure prominently in public administration curriculums and classrooms. Such a focus…

Modern conditions of public administration are formed in the BANI world (Grabmeier, 2020), unstable, disturbing, uniquely technological and digital. How many of today's civil servants are capable of functioning in such a world through current training and professional development systems? This issue is particularly relevant for post-Soviet…