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 as a field of work and study offers a theoretically rich yet practical tool to enact student engagement and the ideal of students-as-partners: the principles of service co-creation. Public administration, as an interdisciplinary and applied field, promoting and reflecting democratic principles, is a good source of tools for…

The article provides a complementary view to those accounts of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe that (a) explain its development primarily as a reflection of changes in administrative cultures while (b) emphasizing the ongoing process of curricular diversification. Rather, the article…

The following contribution hypothesizes that it is crucial for future professionals in public administrations and organizations to be familiar with the concepts, tools, and techniques of policy, public, and social entrepreneurship to address societal, environmental, health, and wicked problems in an innovative and sustainable way. Attention is…

Public administration can be considered as an applied, interdisciplinary field, whose study demands the contribution of a range of disciplines, including political science, management, law, sociology and others. The article argues that the disciplines of public administration should also include philosophy, not as a discipline (philosophy is not a…

Contemporary public management in Brazil is undergoing a great deal of transformation. From the year 2008 the Brazilian Federal government has been investing in policies and planned actions that aim to expand access to Higher Education. This paradigm shift was possible through the understanding that the agenda of public problems required trained…

This article aims to discuss the health of the public administration discipline in the US higher education system. In particular, it debates two possible alternatives: decline or reposition. The paper analyzes the academic offers of political science, public policy, and public administration programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The…

The article explores the changing patterns of disciplinary orientation in European public administration (PA) education. The study builds on an earlier research, which defined three distinct clusters of countries, based on their specific PA education tradition. It asks whether countries' movement away from the Legalist paradigm has continued since…

This article is a contribution to a special issue of "Teaching Public Administration," which offers teachers with many years' experience the opportunity to reflect on changes over time. The context for this paper is teaching public administration in Northern Ireland, a region of the UK that has a sizeable public sector but a distinctive…

The goal of this paper is to provide a comparative account of tax administration training systems in V4 countries. We also compare their structure to basic training principles, such as those set out by the Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administrations. Because of limited data availability we concentrated on basic characteristics, not on…

This article begins by reviewing developments in the field of public administration over the past 50 years and identifying factors that have served, in some cases unintentionally, to undermine public confidence in the actual practice of public administration. It then examines a number of important conditions that must be addressed in the…

Over the past decades, Public Administration (PA) education programmes in Europe shifted their focus from a predominantly law-oriented approach to a more multidisciplinary, social science and managerial one. This paper deals with the tenacity of traditional, law-oriented PA education programmes that can be found in a limited, but not…

The decolonialisation of the higher education curriculum and free higher education were two of the burning issues during student protests that erupted across universities in South Africa at the end of 2015. Although the president announced free higher education in December 2017, the country can scarcely afford it, with many universities already…

What is understood by "public administration" in the contemporary UK higher education setting? Is it still being taught and, if so, why? These questions initially appear to be fairly straightforward but any review of the topic quickly poses some rather more tricky areas of enquiry. This article will focus upon three central questions.…

This article intends to raise a number of issues regarding teaching public administration in the higher education sector and the value it has for individuals and society. The article explores the issue of value with reference to the teaching and learning of Public Administration as a discipline in the wider societal context. The article argues…