US Public Administration: from Local to Global

Interacting global and local forces have increased demands for good governance globally. Thus, by increasing demands for effective responses to trends and events, globalization has helped transform politics and public administration by highlighting tensions between globalism and parochialism, public policy-making and markets, and national sovereignty and networked governance in the U.S. Globalization has also exposed academic conflicts within public administration theory, including tensions between disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches, tensions between economics and other social science disciplines, and tensions over comparative administration, development administration and global New Public Management as approaches to international public administration. Scholarly disputes aside, applying comparative public administration research to global development issues is a challenge. While "best practices" of public administration assume that innovations may be readily transferred from one situation to another, "smart practices" of public administration more appropriately focuse on how culture and other contextual variables affect the feasibility and sustainability of administrative reforms. Because the same competencies are required of public administrators in multicultural work teams as in diverse ones, globalization has also contributed to the convergence of domestic diversity management, the global multicultural policies and the programs in public and private work places. Public administrators can become more professionally competent and personally comfortable with diversity by combining academic and experiential learning. They and their employers can work with universities, institutes of public administration and professional associations that model diversity and inclusiveness, and can serve members both face-to-face and virtually.