Diversity, cultural competency, and global awareness are three broad and mutually reinforcing conceptual themes in the literature of American public affairs education that are rarely implicitly interconnected. A primary challenge has concerned how to teach these themes, either separately or in unison, when designing courses and curricula to satisfy professional standards. This article first explores how broad conceptual themes can be practically transformed into course learning objectives on which assignments may be based. Second, this article explores how comparative public administration and policy may be utilized as a venue for drawing analytical connections across the three themes to promote higher levels of critical thinking. Although comparative approaches have historically been grounded in research-focused studies, pedagogical development of the field holds significant promise in training public administrators to better understand the intricacies of different cultures, nations, governments, and policies as a facet of learning and job performance. This article illustrates several assignment examples of how comparative analysis may be integrated as a pedagogical strategy in teaching American public affairs students the complexities of public service in the diverse and multicultural world of the 21st century.
This symposium showcases diverse contributions that a particular institutional theory of cultural biases makes to public administration and policy research. Bridging and integrating these subfields, the theory offers powerful explanations for the ways in which institutional processes drive policy‐making. Developed initially by Douglas using Durkheimian theory, Hood and Wildavsky made the theory increasingly influential in public administration and policy. Today, the theory has several variants which nevertheless share common core elements. We briefly survey this institutional theory's contributions to the study of public administration and policy before describing its central claims, analysing the uses of its variants in the symposium articles, and identifying their key advances. We conclude with challenges and promising developments in efforts to conceptualize, operationalize, and test the theory in public administration and policy research.
There has been a proliferation of administrative practices and processes of policy‐making and policy delivery beyond but often overlapping with traditional nation state policy processes. New formal and informal institutions and actors are behind these policy processes, often in cooperation with national public administrations but sometimes quite independently from them. These 'multi‐stakeholder initiatives', 'global public–private partnerships' and 'global commissions' are creating or delivering global policies even though the geographic pattern of policy action can vary considerably. Implementation may occur at (trans)national or local levels in different regions more or less contemporaneously, or also in problem contexts that are cross‐border and co‐jurisdictional, hence our use of the term 'transnational administration'. Traditional policy and public administration studies have tended to undertake analysis of the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies rather than to investigate transnational policy‐making above and beyond the state. This article extends the ambit of public administration and policy studies into what has traditionally been considered the realm of International Relations scholarship to identify and map new modes of global (public) policy and transnational administration and prospects for ongoing conceptualization.