PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT. VOL. 8.

125-134 (1988)

The maturing of development administration

MILTON J. ESMAN
Cornell University

SUMMARY
This article traces the evolution of the concepts underlying development administration since
its origin as a distinct subdiscipline in the early 1960s. It relates the main thrusts in
development administration to changing theories and approaches to economic and social
development, especially the appropriate functions oi' the state, the implications of
modernization, and the capabilities of people outside the modern coje in urban centres.
Seven major themes have emerged during the past decade. Their acceptance among
academics and practitioners has produced a more sophisticated, realistic and useful
appreciation of the relationships of public administration to development. Though this bodes
well for the future, an unsolved problem is the continuing intellectual hegemony of Western
concepts and practices, despite an impressive number of highly trained Third World scholars
and well-established Third World institutions operating in this field. There is evidence that
the ongoing search for effective indigenous management practices will greatly enrich
development administration as a field of inquiry and of practice.
DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION AND 'MODERNIZATION'

As it emerged in the early 1960s, development administration was the product of a

distinctive Zeitgeist. It reflected a pronounced confidence in the capacity of
government, big government, to contribute positively to social progress (Appleby,
1945). Was it not big government that had mitigated the Great Depression of the
1930s, successfully mobilized and managed the war economy of the 1940s, financed
and supervised the Marshall Plan partnership that restored the shattered economies
of Western Europe, and guided the unprecedented and sustained economic growth
of the 1950s and early 1960s, the age of affluence that would never end? (Galbraith,
1957). This was the heyday of Keynesian economics, when even an originally
reluctant Eisenhower administration admitted its conversion to the new faith. The
legitimacy of the welfare state was unchallenged in Europe and its belated
acceptance in the United States was confirmed by the overwhelming defeat of
Barry Goldwater in 1964. During the Kennedy era the United States foreign aid
agency required candidates for American economic assistance to request funds
within the framework of government-sponsored national development plans.
Big government was regarded as the beneficent instrument of an expanding
economy and increasingly just society. The record of the previous quarter-century
had demonstrated that big government could be fully compatible with individual
freedom; in fact it had enhanced that freedom as well as the welfare of the great
Milton Esman is Professor of Government at Cornell University, McGraw Hall, Ithaca, New York
14853, U.S.A. This paper was presented to the Annual Conference of the American Society for Public
Administration in Anaheim, California, April 1986.

0271-2075/88/020125-10$05.00
1988 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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M. J. Esman

majority, and its potential abuses could be controlled by normal democratic

processes. The mixed economy would grow, and at no cost to economic efficiency.
But of course big government had to be administered, and it was President Johnson
who attempted to insure the efficiency of his Great Society programmes by
converting government operations to managerial economics as practised by US
corporations through the PPBS systems.
As the range and scope of government operations expanded, academic public
administration became uneasy with the constricting boundaries of POSDCORB, of
routine operations and of the conventional staff services. Its more venturesome
thinkers began to incorporate political conflict, insights from the new behavioural
sciences, and substantive programmatic concerns into more sophisticated models of
public administration.
Among them were members of the first wave of American students of public
administration engaged in managing economic aid or providing technical assistance
to newly independent, pre-industrial countries. These pioneers found their
academic equipment inadequate to the combined tasks of strengthening administrative institutions and managing substantive programmes in agriculture, health,
industry, transport, and related sectors. They also found their ideas on public
administration to be painfully culture-bound and excessively dogmatic. Overseas
experience had not, however, tempered their confidence in big government.
Indeed, it was thought that only through proactive government could what came to
be known as Third World peoples be redeemed from poverty and ignorance.
Parallel to the ascendency of Keynesian economics was the unprecedented postWorld War II expansion of the social sciences. 'Modernization' was the dominant
paradigm. There were two themes in modernization that reinforced the notion of
big government and the salience of development administration as a moral and
intellectual vocation. The first was the universality and inevitability of the spread of
Western values and practices such as instrumental rationality, secularism,
individualism, and science-based enlightenment to all the areas and peoples of the
earth (Black, 1966; Riggs, 1957). Radiating from the established Euro-American
centres of advanced technological civilization, modernization would convey to late
developers the same benefits, just as inevitably as it already had to Europe and
North America. Development administration represented a complex of insights,
skills, and practices that could facilitate modernization and thereby help, in the
spirit of President Truman's point-four message, to vindicate and universalize
America's moral responsibility to share its technical achievements with less
fortunate peoples.
The second theme of the modernization paradigm derived from its elitist bias.
The agents of modernization would be an enlightened minority, endowed with
Western education and committed to transforming their societies along Western
lines for the benefit of all. This transforming minority would work out of the main
urban centres. Through their control of government they would rationalize
economic life, expand the modern centres, and gradually penetrate the traditional
institutions of the rural periphery through the state bureaucracy. Public administration would be the principal instrumentality by which the modernizing elites would
penetrate and absorb the traditional periphery. The modernizers would welcome
economic and technical assistance from the West, especially from the United States
which epitomized technical progress and economic success. Though handicapped

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127

by dysfunctional traditions, limited skills, and even corrupt practices, public

administration within the framework of big government was the appropriate
mechanism for promoting and guiding modernization and economic development.
While much remained to be done, the mood was optimistic and the future was
filled with confidence. Intellectually the problems were thought to be under
control, though important details needed to be filled in by research and experience.
Needed most were hard work, sustained commitment, 'political will' and, of
course, applied research which would reduce uncertainty and facilitate the transfer
and adaptation of Western technologies and institutions. The future for development and for development administration was bright. Both would be facilitated by
the enlightened, expanding, and novel international phenomenon of foreign aid.

THE REJECTION OF BIG GOVERNMENT

Since the heady days of the early 1960s which gave birth to development
administration, a generation has passed. A new environment has emerged which
rejects most of the founding premises of the development administration
movement, undermining its original intellectual and political foundations. Few
observers in the early 1960s would have prophesied the resurgence of neoclassical
economics as a political ideology, with its adoration of market mechanisms, its
social-Darwinian ethics, and its intense hostility to government. The conquest of
political power by neoconservatives in Great Britain, and especially the tJnited
States, has influenced the climate of opinion everywhere.
The ascendant doctrine disparages government as a potential threat to individual
freedom and as the enemy of economic efficiency. The more government attempts,
the worse the consequences. The current watchwords are deregulation, privatization, and minimal government. National development planning has been consigned
to the scrapheap of failed ideas, and candidates for US foreign aid must now
demonstrate their commitment to privatization. Solutions to society's problems are
to be found in the 'magic of the market', in benign neglect, or in voluntary social
action, but not through the state.
An improbable coalition has arisen which agrees on few propositions except that
big government and government bureaucracies are the problem, not the solution.
Partners in this ideological marriage of convenience are business- oriented, lowtax, anti-regulation advocates of the minimal state and the counterculture
communitarians who regard government as the inherently exploitative instrument
of a morally corrupt and violent capitalist establishment which is destroying the
natural environment, promoting nuclear war, and encroaching on the rights of
social minorities.
While these powerful ideological currents have undermined faith in government
as the universal problem-solver of the 1960s, practical experience has also
contributed to lowering public expectations. The easy money that economic
expansion made available to the governments of industrialized states for welfare
programmes, and to Third World governments for the expansion of physical and
social infrastructures, has dried up. The flow of foreign economic assistance to
developing countries began to taper off at the very time that their capacity to
absorb external funds was increasing. As domestic budgets became tight.

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governments found it necessary to curb and even contract public services, to

attempt to extract greater productivity from their staffs, and to search for more
cost-effective ways to pursue more limited goals. This included greater reliance on
non-government instrumentalities. The scope of big government in most LDCs was
inherently limited by financial constraints that were not likely soon to disappear.
Moreover, the performance of government bureaucracies as agents of social and
economic development proved disappointing. The bureaupathologies familiar to
students of Western government were replicated in Third World polities heavily
dependent on relatively inexperienced and ill-trained personnel operating through
formalistic structures and procedures that inhibited their performance. Investments
in staff training, in structural and procedural reforms, and in modern technologies
produced only modest and gradual improvements. In some cases bureaucratic
expansion seemed to entail only greater nepotism, corruption, incompetence, and
waste of public funds. Thus local elites and their foreign advisors were constrained
to reduce their expectations about the capabilities of bureaucratic agencies and to
search for other means to consolidate their regimes and provide public services.
This greatly reduced confidence in the efficacy of government and of public
administration was reinforced by the disintegration of another pillar of the
intellectual structure of development administration. The modernization paradigm
began to unravel. The ability of the modernizing educated elites operating
primarily through government to diffuse modern attitudes and practices came
under question, as did their interest in helping the poor majority. Prevailing
strategies of growth and modernization were bypassing the majority of people,
especially in the rural areas and the urban informal sector. In response the
periphery was rediscovered. The rural peasantry and the urban informal sector had
been found by prestigious students of modernization to be wallowing in ignorance
and fatalism, trapped in cultures of poverty that were reproduced over the
generations (Lewis, 1964). Revisionist scholars, however, diagnosed the persistence of poverty as structural, not cultural (Popkin, 1979). Poor people, they
found, are rational economic actors, eager to adopt improvements that do not
entail unacceptable risks. Remarkably resourceful in making the most of the little
they have, what they need are economic opportunities, institutional reforms, and
political empowerment, not the benevolent guidance of modernizing elites. The
democratic ethos had begun to supplant the elitism of the modernization paradigm.
Development would require less public administration and more public policies
that facilitate structural changes, liberate individual initiatives and reward local
self-help.
The past two decades also witnessed a sharp decline in expectations about the
intentions of the West toward the Third World. Among Third World intellectuals
charges of dependency and neocolonial exploitation in north-south relations, and
demands for a new international economic order, soon replaced the optimistic
message of partnership proclaimed by the Pearson Commission in the late 1960s
(Pearson, 1969). Not only was the West, and especially the United States,
unreliable in its motives, but many of its institutions and practices might be
unsuitable and even detrimental to autonomous, indigenous development. As
economic growth faltered, public support for government-funded foreign aid
diminished. In the United States the trauma of Vietnam undermined much of what
remained of the generous spirit of international solidarity that had sustained the

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Marshall Plan. Foreign aid programmes were increasingly oriented to national

security concerns and to export promotion. So far as development administration
represented the spread of Western, especially American, social technologies and its
vehicle was foreign assistance, the political climate was far more sceptical and less
supportive both in the West and in the Third World.
COMMON THEMES IN DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION

Given the erosion of its political and intellectual support systems it is remarkable
that interest in development administration survived at all. The earliest blows were
felt by American academics whose enthusiasm had been whetted by the challenge
of Third World development and chanelled by the activities of the Comparative
Administration Group in APS A. As funds dried up interest waned. But while the
sunshine patriots drifted away, a stubborn minority, through their own initiatives,
continued to find research opportunities, to teach and even to maintain informal
networks of communication. A few searched out their own means of support
through individual research grants; others took advantage of contacts with
international organizations and Third World administration centres. The precarious foothold that development administration retained in the US foreign aid
agency, and in national centres in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Holland,
provided modest opportunities for research. A few academics worked on the
administrative dimensions of specific sectors such as public health, family planning,
and urban-regional development. The largest group capitalized on the renewed
interest in rural development, inspired by the US Congress's 'new directions'
mandate of 1973 and the UN-sponsored World Conference on Agrarian Reform
and Rural Development. Many of these studies attracted the talents of developmentally oriented social scientists untrained in political science or public administration, but drawn to problems of implementation and action.
These individual and small-scale efforts have produced a continuing flow of
publications that have combined empirical substance with increasing conceptual
sophistication. Above all, the knowledge thus generated has achieved a critical
mass and a cumulative quality that appears to be self-sustaining. The grand, often
grandiloquent, theorizing and system-building of the 1960s, and the ideological
conflicts between detached critics and action-oriented scholars, appear to have
dissipated. A number of common themes have emerged at the level of middlerange theory at the critical interface between concepts and social action. While they
fall short of consensus, they nevetheless represent common ground which unites
the interests of scholars and practitioners and provide the basis for informed
dialogue and mutual criticism and learning. These themes have been influenced, of
course, by the macro-level intellectual currents of this generation, including
disenchantment with big government and centralized bureaucracy, but these have
not been embraced uncritically. These themes represent, however, a considerable
departure from the dominant spirit of the 1960s. Together they provide a much
more mature and realistic orientation to the prospects for Third World development and the functions of public administration. Let me review a few of these
common themes:
1. Governments are limited in their capacity, and these limitations should be

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incorporated into the design of public programmes. Slow economic growth,

combined with reduced foreign assistance, has imposed severe limitations on the
financial means available to mount new development activities, and these financial
stringencies are not likely to be relieved in the near future. Despite substantial
investments in staff training, improvements in the management of public services
have fallen short of expectation. Confidence that government can provide the
missing ingredient of entrepreneurship has been undermined by the dismal
performance of industrial enterprises in the public sector.
2. Because governments cannot do it all, alternative and complementary channels
need to be identified and fostered. Among Thid World elites and intellectuals this
search for alternatives may be a reluctant necessity, not an article of faith as it is
among Western neoconservatives. Nevertheless, the virtues of the market as an
efficient allocator, and of private enterprise as efficient managers, have been
rediscovered. Voluntary non-government organizations, indigenous and foreign,
have been found useful for a variety of services that involve hands-on experimentation and responsiveness to low-income publics. Local initiatives through longneglected local authorities, and through local institutions responsible to their own
members, have been found effective for collective resource mobilization, the
management of local facilities and services, and as sources of initiative that can
supplement and even supplant government in a number of fields from public health
to irrigation, rural credit, and small public works. From this expansion of the
channels available for carrying out development activities, investigators have begun
to explore patterns of linkage and division of labour among governmental, private,
and voluntary agencies. These emergent relationships are far more complex but at
the same time more realistic than the earlier dependence on standard government
bureaucratic methods (Uphoff, 1986; Korten, 1986; Leonard and Marshall, 1982).
3. Programme designers recognize and capitalize on the pluralistic properties of
public administration. The 1960s represented the high point in theorizing about
such abstractions as polity, economy, society, and public administration as
integrated 'systems'. Improvements in performance could thus be approached as
system-wide initiatives. The failure of ambitious programmes for comprehensive
administrative reform has generated a reaction against systems concepts and a
renewed appreciation of sector-specific problems, including the distinctive elements,
in concrete administrative structures. These vary in the technologies they employ,
the publics they serve, the political support on which they draw, and even the
quality of their leadership. Bureaucracy, even in the same government, is now
recognized as a pluralistic phenomenon. Development administrators have learned
to be opportunistic in their choice of activities and agencies, to be more sensitive to
timing and to demand, and to be pleased with appreciable improvements within a
single programme or agency. In short, they have been coverted to the strategies of
disjointed incrementalism and unbalanced development (Dahl and Lindblom,
1953; Hirschman, 1967).
4. Participation is an important dimension in the administration of public services.
The models of the 1960s presumed bureaucratic hierarchies which delivered prepackaged goods and services to their publics according to classical hierarchical
bureaucratic models and the prevailing centre-periphery notions. Subsequent
research and reflection concluded that, for development activities, responsive
behaviour from the affected publics is required if services are to be accepted and if

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they are to produce the intended behavioural changes, including investments of

time and resources (Montgomery, 1974), Effective programme design calls for
contributions of local information, while implementation requires local resources
and managerial skills. Development activities came to be conceived as processes of
'co-production' rather than service delivery, necessitating public participation in all
phases of programme management from design to implementation and evaluation
(Bryant and White, 1984). Instead of passive beneficiaries (client systems), the
relevant publics through their own organizations would have to be engaged as
active participants in administrative networks and empowered to make their claims
on the service bureaucracies and on the political system (Esman and Uphoff 1984).
5. Societal contexts provide both specific opportunities and special constraints for
development administration. Administrative institutions are embedded in political,
cultural, and institutional contexts that both constrain instrumental rationality and
provide strategic opportunities for accomplishment. If development activities are to
function within these distinctive frameworks the latter need to be patiently studied
and specifically incorporated into programme design. Both goals and methods must
take these ecological factors into account. While this is not a new theme in the
literature, methods of acting upon it have only recently been emphasized, including
the search for indigenous and informal management processesa subject to which
I shall return.
Development administration is expected not only to accommodate, but also to
bring changes to, its environment. At both project and programme levels of action,
behaviour that produces and protects innovation depends on combinations of
sanctions and incentives that meet the tests of political and cultural feasibility.
Available incentives and sanctions are not only individual and economic, but also
collective and non-material; the latter especially are derived from indigenous
culture and experience.
6. A related change has been the enhanced appreciation of the uncertainties and
contingencies inherent in deliberate efforts at developmental change. Coping with
these uncertainties necessitates far-reaching reorientation in programme management and administrative procedures. Architectural and blueprinting approaches by
Third World governments and aid donors alike need to be replaced by the
recognition that development activities represent action hypotheses, experiments
that require continuing organizational learning with built-in monitoring procedures
so that innovations might be adapted to experience and context (Esman and
Montgomery, 1969; Korten, 1980; Rondinelli, 1982). This requires a style of
administration that is sensitive to the need for learning, continuous adjustment and
exchanges with affected publics, rather than the authoritarian and rule-bound
procedures and the command style of conventional bureaucratic administration,
7. More in tune with traditional public administration are the renewed pressures
on governments: (a) to extract greater productivity from continuing expenditures on
the large array of public services that must remain in the hands of the state, even
when full allowance is made for privatization and deregulation; and (b) to reorient
government bureaucracies to serve large disadvantaged publics more responsively
(Korten and Uphoff, 1982). Economy and efficiency represented only minor
themes in the original doctrine of development administration during the era of
easy money. Some needed reforms are politically risky, such as freezes on the
hiring of new staff, especially of university graduates. Cautious experiments with

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administrative decentralization to speed action, and to make agencies more

responsive to local needs, threaten established patterns of bureaucratic control. So
do efforts to stimulate competition and provide more effective incentives for civil
servants. How can Western management technologies be institutionalized in
administrative cultures that provide little social support and few incentives for costeffective performance?
FUTURE PROSPECTS

The academic study of public administration in the West has been buffeted by many
of the volatile intellectual currentssome may call them fadsof the past quartercentury. These range from the destructuring of organizations, predicting that postindustrial management will incorporate the communitarian ethos of modern
research organizations; to the view of development administration as an instrument
of Western imperialism inherently exploitative of Third World peoples; to the
current efforts to constrict administration within the paradigm of radical
individualism and neoclassical ethics associated with public choice theory.
In most developing countries, on the other hand, attentive publics concerned
with public administration have managed to stay clear of these intellectual fashions.
They have managed to expand their institutes and training centres for development
administration. They have persevered in their conviction that government must
have a majorthough not exclusiverole in social and economic development,
and that public administration, mainly through bureaucratic structures, should be
the mainbut not the onlyinstrument by which development activities are
implemented. Improvements in staffing, structures, technologies and procedures
have proceeded incrementally. Innovations such as computerization, privatization
and local participation have been accommodatedsome substantively, others only
symbolicallybut within a framework that accepts active government and
administrative institutions as essential to social order and material progress. While
development administration was losing its appeal to Western academics, and was
starved for financial support among aid donors, there emerged a significant
constituency among intellectuals and officials in developing countries eager to
absorb the new literature and willing to engage in cross-national training sessions
and intellectual exchanges. Since development relates directly to their recognized
needs and aspirations, and since their political cultures have not included the
Jeffersonian suspicion of government, they have sustained what they consider to be
a natural interest in development administration. They have responded favourably
to such trends as the expansion of American public administration into the realm of
public policy analysis, because they are comfortable with the notion that senior
officials should participate actively in the policy process.
As yet, however, the overseas centres of public administration have not
challenged the hegemony of Western ideas and practices. Despite the critical mass
of well-trained academics and practitioners in many developing countries, their
models continue to be inspired by Western ideas and Western experience, and
these tend to be reproduced in their training programmes and in their research. The
increasing scepticism, already noted, about Western intentions and the relevance of
Western practices to their circumstances, combined with the success of Japanese
industrial management, might be expected to evoke the search for indigenous

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133

management principles and practices. Some analyses and accounts of successful

indigenous practices have recently appeared in the literature, including the
sophisticated subak system of irrigation management in Bali, and the zanjera
water-management institutions in the Philippines (Coward, 1979; Siy, 1982); the
construction methods used successfully for building water supply systems in Malawi
(Liebenow, 1981) and bridges in Nepal (Pradhan, 1980); the mobilization and
management of credit among the Tiv of central Nigeria (Morss et al., 1976); and the
complex barter exchanges operated by the Anyi-Ruway local development
associations in the Bolivian highlands (Healy, 1980). Ironically, however, it is
among Western scholars working on Third World data that the search has begun
for indigenous 'informal' management systems, in the hope that these processes can
provide alternative, more effective incentives for performance.
The network of scholars now working on development administration includes a
growing component of highly trained specialists from Third World countries. Their
numbers are likely to grow because their subject responds to recognized needs in
their societies. Inevitably they will be drawn to the search for indigenous
management technologies and to fresh concepts to explain them. These will have
both disrupting and enriching impacts on the discipline. They will challenge
scholars with the need to cope with increasing pluralism among concrete practices,
and with ongoing efforts to achieve fresh conceptual integration from a much richer
array of experience. That these tensions will confront the discipline during the next
decade is a reasonable expectation.
When one encounters the maturation of a discipline it is hard to avoid the
brooding spectre of postmature senility. A postmature discipline is one that has lost
the wellsprings of its creativity, that has run out of interesting ideas, that has seen
its premises or its expectations repudiated or reduced to triviality by experience.
Such paradigms as supply-side economics and such nascent 'scientific' disciplines as
craniology proved to be sterile, and had to be abandoned. Will this be the fate of
development administration? Though I once entertained such fears I am now
confident that they can be safely laid aside. The founding generation, convinced
that they were working on interesting and consequential problems, was able to
survive through informal networks. They are passing from the scene, but their
concerns have been taken up by a significantly larger cohort of energetic and
productive successors, many of them securely based in, and protected by,
institutional networks in Third World countries. The institutionalization ofthe field
is an indicator of relevance and of maturation; that these institutions are rooted in
Third World societies is an encouraging augury for vigour and for growth.
Despite intellectual and political currents that have undermined many of its
founding assumptions, its master premisethat public administration is an
indispensable instrument of economic and social developmenthas proved to be
robust and resilient. As a field of inquiry, development administration has not only
survived the limitations of its founders, but it has successfully adapted to a much
more realistic set of expectations about the process of development and the
potentialities of the public sector. It has begun to build a sophisticated body of
knowledge drawn from, and tested against, empirical experience. As Third World
scholars become more prominent contributors, and introduce fresh insights and
experience from the experience of their societies, the field should enjoy a sustained
period of vitality and usefulness. Mature yes, but dynamic still.

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