ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines how public management in developing countries continuously faces diverse challenges from expected as well as unexpected sources, and how these have contributed to its inability to make desired goals. Countries in the developing world stand at a critical crossroads in their roughly sixty-year, post-colonial experimentation with various kinds of development models and administrative fads. Public sector reform policies and programs as a result are a study in the complexities of the institutional and environmental context in which these reforms are pursued. This is the central argument presented throughout this book. The books focus on the themes of participation and decentralization articulated the challenges and prospects of reform and change in the developing world. It places an emphasis on making an empirically grounded case for focusing on the state-society interface in the developing world.
