Comments on Purpose and Methods
Evan Berman
This book serves the needs of those who wish to learn how government works in Southeast Asia, focusing on the systems of public administration. Whether readers are practitioners, professors, students, or just those with plain curiosity, nowhere else will they find a book that provides such a comprehensive treatment of public administration in Southeast Asia as presented. For many years, people have been fascinated with the cultures, peoples, and governments of Southeast Asia, and now they have a book that discusses the apparatus of governments in Southeast Asia—their agencies, contexts, processes, and values.
Growing internationalization and increased sophistication in teaching of public administration increases the need for actual factual information about these public administration systems. While separate journal articles and government reports look at some of these aspects, this book provides a comprehensive and comparative, in-depth look at major components of administrative systems. Specifically, topics cover the history and context of public administration, performance management reforms, civil service reforms, public ethics and corruption, and central-local government relations across several countries and regions. In this book, these topics allow answering such questions as:
What is the history of public administration development in Southeast Asia?
How are major decisions made in the agencies in Southeast Asia?
What are the ethical underpinnings of public agencies in Southeast Asia?
Why are intergovernmental relations an essential issue in Southeast Asia?
What are the politics behind economic development efforts?
To what extent is performance management emphasized in Southeast Asia?
What is the nature of civil service reform in Southeast Asia?
What is the nature of efforts to combat government corruption in Southeast Asia?
Without doubt, these are interesting matters, and both research and practices require this knowledge. For example, theory generation requires solid familiarity of the underlying facts of the region. This book is a second, parallel volume to Public Administration in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, published earlier. Both books are organized in parallel
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© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
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sections that discuss similar topics of the countries and administrative regions (Hong Kong, Macao). When read in conjunction with the first book, readers can engage in comparative analysis that involves Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macao, Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These two volumes provide the essential “one stop” shopping for public administration in East and Southeast Asia.*
This book also has several distinctive features that we think readers will value. First, this account is written by those of the region, not by those outside the region. The advantage of getting the insider perspective and viewpoint is self-evident. Second, the authors are all experts in their fields, having published many journals and books in the discipline. Brief biographies are provided in the opening pages of this book. Third, authors were asked to cover both essentials as well as advanced points in their chapters. Fourth, each chapter contains useful resources to pursue further interest in specific, in-depth matters. Fifth, authors were given broad leeway and discretion to discuss whatever way they felt were most important for others outside geographic area to know about. They could also discuss additional topics. By doing so, we encourage the use concepts or perspectives that are different or distinctive to their area.
The selection of countries and regions in this book reflects the diversity of Southeast Asia. Some are large (e.g., Thailand), and some are small (e.g., Macao). They vary in colonial legacy: American and Spanish (the Philippines), British (Hong Kong and Malaysia), and Portuguese (Macao); Thailand has no colonial legacy. One is Buddhist (Thailand), one is Muslim (Malaysia), and the others are secular. Of course, the countries and administrative regions do not encompass all in the region. The nature of any detailed examination requires inevitable trade-off between breadth (countries) and depth (topics); it is inherent to a project such as this. The selection is also based on the availability of scholarship and experts in each field that can write at global standards. In some countries, public administration is nascent, at best, while in one instance (Singapore) scholars are unwilling or unable to share their views. The selection of topics within each country or administration region was guided by disciplinary interests and the possibility of using material in public administration education, in these countries and beyond. The practicality of marketing matters. For example, public administration education in Thailand is strong and centralized within National Institute for Development Administration within which a book such as this can find widespread adoption. We think that these chapters will be widely used in education throughout the world. We hope that in due time another volume might be compiled for countries not included here.
Of course, I am not an insider of Southeast Asia. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was raised in the Netherlands and spent 20 years of my professional career in the United States. My wife is from Brazil, which I have visited often. I have travelled several times to Africa, too. I am now working at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and I am editor-in-chief for Taylor & Francis of the book series within which this volume appears (see About the Authors). I think my familiarity with the West is an advantage in this effort. Western concepts are significantly culturally and contextually embedded, that sometimes have different meanings or shades in Southeast Asia. I also used my editorial and scholarly experience to help avoid misinterpretation and confusion, and to ensure that writing styles meet global expectations for easy and smooth reading, which I hope readers appreciate. I carefully tried to convey the meanings and intentions of the authors.
*It should be noted that the countries in Public Administration in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan include two additional chapters for each country, namely, public policy processes (and citizen participation) and e-government.
©2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
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The Approach
Considerable care was used in developing the methods for this book. A project like this requires many choices and requires much more than “slapping chapters together and putting them between book covers.” All comparative works require that guidance be given to authors so that chapters are comparable. A balance is needed between giving too much guidance, thereby stifling interesting insights and preventing authors from articulating that which may be unique to their setting and too little guidance that might result in little more than a collection of interesting, but unrelated facts. This task was addressed and described in the first volume, Public Administration in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, where area coordinators decided to provide a
Table 1 Detailed Chapter Outlines
First Chapter: History and Context of Public Administration
•Context and driving forces in the development of PA (include administrative culture, societal culture, institutional description of government, and definition of the public sector). Note: the chapter will focus on central government.
•Historical periods of PA. Focus on practices, not development of PA as a discipline (though may additionally mention that). Should mention the development of major new tools, such as privatization.
•Administrative values inherent in the above periods, but also discussion of the relationship with any core values in Western PA: equity, democracy, accountability, relationship with the legislature, efficiency of government, and role of government in society (restrictive vs invasive). Such a focus on “values” can help link the discussion to the broader global literature on PA.
•Current state of democracy, civil society, democratization efforts, citizen input in decision making (narrow), and participatory democracy (broad). Discuss implications for public administration.
•Emerging issues.
Second Chapter: Decentralization and Local Governance or IGR (for Hong Kong and Macao)
•Decentralization or IGR reforms.
•Driving forces, legal basis and barriers.
•Results of decentralization reforms.
•Description of local government as involving public authorities, schools, taxing districts, etc.
•Examples or cases.
•Discuss how decentralization affects the development of civil society, democratization, citizen input in decision making (narrow), and participatory democracy (broad).
Third Chapter: Public Service Ethics and Corruption
•Ethics laws and legal compliance, especially unique features of the administrative system.
•Nature of corruption: individual (e.g., bribery) as well as institutional and organizational (e.g., revolving doors).
•Efforts to inspire ethical behavior through moral leadership of senior officials, ethics training, codes of ethics, ethics audits, performance measurement relating to ethics, etc.
•May include international ranking such as Transparency International (and others).
(continued)
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Table 1 (continued) Detailed Chapter Outlines
Fourth Chapter: Performance Management Reforms
•Definition of performance management. Include program and organizational level reforms, as well as e-government. Note: individual level reforms are discussed in Chapter 4 (HRM); intergovernmental relations (IGR) are discussed in Chapter 5.
•Brief overview of history of performance management in the administrative system. Include discussion of relevant laws and legal framework.
•Discuss performance management reforms during the last 10 years in detail. May include budgeting.
•Assess the outcomes of performance management reforms—cases, systematic evaluation, etc.
•Examples or cases in so far as they are unique to the administrative system.
•Avoid long discussions of IT applications that are well known in the international literature. Rather, provide unique IT applications, if any, the infrastructure or processes of IT decision making, and any legal issues (e.g., privacy) as relevant.
Fifth Chapter: Civil Service Systems
•Include individual-level performance management in this chapter (not part of Chapter 2).
•Recruitment and selection of workers and managers.
•Status of civil servants in society.
•Benefits and compensation.
•Relationships between civil servants and elected officials.
•Major reforms in recent years. (Note: should not be more than 30%–40% of the chapter.)
•Civil service culture at the micro-level (human interactions, bureaucratic culture).
•Obstacles to civil service reform.
•Examples or cases.
scope of general topics that constitute essentials as well as specific concerns that are relevant to a modern, international audience. Such an approach increases the likelihood of relevance, provides a context for prioritizing and, within that, great leeway for authors to discuss whatever they felt constituted the basic understandings about their topic. In comparative studies, such an approach is not uncommon.*
A list of topics was provided to area coordinators of this volume and, for the most part, adopted. The resulting guidelines are shown in Table 1, which de facto are the chapter outlines and basis for comparison.
Considerable care was also given to matters of quality control. Authors were selected based on their expertise and reputation for their subject matter in their home countries. All manuscripts went through a three-stage review process. In the first review, manuscripts were reviewed by coordinators and others in the country for coverage (scope), accuracy, currency, and objectivity. They were also reviewed by me as editor to ensure coverage that would allow for cross-analysis later. The manuscripts were sent back to the authors, who then resubmitted their manuscript. In the
*The introduction to Public Administration in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan provides a detailed discussion of the process and content of coordinator meetings.
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second review, I edited the language, format, and structure of the chapters to maximize readability and facilitate comparison; between three hours and three days was spent on each manuscript. The chapters were sent back to the authors for final review. In the third review, copyeditors from Taylor & Francis Group “fine tuned” the language and made it suitable for publication. The result is this book.
I hope this book increases familiarity with public administration in Southeast Asia, and also plays a useful role in integrating our world just a little bit more. Readers should feel free to contact the authors, all of whom have email addresses that can be found on the internet.
Evan Berman
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC