ABSTRACT
From studies on “development administration” to ruminating on the concept of “good governance”, research on comparative public administration has come a long way. Whether in a developed or developing country, “governing development” is the new challenge of our time. Unless a concerted effort is made to use different approaches and methods of data collection and analysis, along with case studies of significant administrative and policy processes, viable and authentic comparative administrative studies will not be available in the public domain. There is an urgent need to codify the results of representative, cooperative and collective research, to enable us to learn from the “best practices” more perceptively in different ecological settings. The inherent tensions between the two opposing pulls—that of globalization and localization, the blurring of public-private divides and increasing global pressures on domestic policy issues, will haunt the practices of public administration across the globe.
