(Online Course) Public Administration for IAS Mains Exams
Topic: Development Dynamics: Development Dynamics: Changing Profile of Development Administration
Development Administration: 1950’s to 1970’s
The development Administration first got started in 1950’s with President Truman’s point four programme and Colombo Plan. This was a decade of optimism, expectations and establishment of international aid agencies in various industrialized countries. In China, India, and Middle East, South East Asia and West and East Africa, a new wave of expectant peoples strained the emerging neo-classical order while tearing down the remnants of the imperial system. Development had become the dominant issue in developing countries. Development Administration was seen as concerned with the will to mobilize existing and new resources and to cultivate appropriate capabilities to achieve developmental goals. Thus, development administration became an essentially action-oriented, goal-oriented administrative system, geared to realise definite programmatic values. It was supposed to be based on a professionally oriented, technically competent, politically and ideologically neutral bureaucratic machinery.
But by the early 70’s, a rude awakening was noticed concerning the inadequacies of the developmentalist paradigm of public administration to cope with the urgent problems. The crisis of developmental administration in this decade became one of identity and purpose with seemingly devastating effects on the entire field of public administration, in the North as well as the South. Assumptions, methodology and focus became increasingly irrelevant. In fact, after its accelerated growth of the 1960’s, development administration apparently plunged into the depth of an intellectual depression.