Decolonization and public administration: Frustrated ramblings of a spoilsport

Abstract

As the public administration community prepares to pick up the mantle of decolonization as guided by our American colleagues, a killjoy points out that this new wave of decolonization is simply another way in which the disciplinary colonial logic of the division of labor between the empire and its periphery are being reinforced. The spoilsport then presents their own vision of decolonization of the discipline, apparently too naïve to see the irony of such an endeavor. The killjoy then comes crashing back to earth with a scathing self-critique finishing the pointless journey of a naively idealistic critique.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• decolonization
• international public administration

If queer is anything, it is a form of immanent critique, an attitude of unceasing disruptiveness, and a taking apart of the taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding knowledge, power and identity… Queering, used here as a general term for unsettling complacencies, for making something strange and hence forcing thought, is a commonality to all these critical movements and moments. (Pullen, Thanem, Tyler, & Wallenberg, 2016, p. 84)

The time for the decolonization of public administration has apparently come. If journal articles (Blessett et al., 2019; Pandey, Newcomer, DeHart‐Davis, Johnson, & Riccucci, 2022) and calls for papers (Coupet, Nisar, Ospina, & Feeney, 2020; Gaynor et al., 2019; Heckler & Nishi, 2022; Young, Wiley, & Cepiku, 2022) are any indications, it appears that public administration is finally ready to engage with its ugly underbelly. Now that our American colleagues have been awakened by local political developments in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, and movements like Black Lives Matter to the historical injustices associated with bureaucracy and governance, scholars from the rest of the world are supposed to get on the decolonization bandwagon and start screaming “Decolonize! Decolonize!” at the top of our lungs. We are not supposed to act like killjoys in this euphoric moment of awakening in the American public administration by pointing out that multiple scholars from around the world have been pointing out similar injustices, similar inequalities, similar erasures, and similar biases for decades but their work attracted limited interest from our American colleagues (Alkadry, 2002, 2004; Amoah, 2012; Binderkrantz, 2011; Candler, Azevêdo, & Albernaz, 2010; De Maria, 2005, 2008; Farazmand, 2002, 2012; Guha, 1997; Gulrajani, 2010; Gulrajani & Moloney, 2012; Haque, 1996, 1997, 2019; Imas, 2005; Kalu, 2004; Kirk-Greene, 1980, 1999; Moore, 2001; Singh, 2005; Subramaniam, 1996, 2000; Thadhani, 2005).

Everyone not belonging to privileged demographic groups in the global north-west knew the time for decolonization had been long overdue in public administration. The only problem was that before the awakening of the decolonization spirit in our American colleagues, the “others” in public administration were repeatedly told, both formally and informally, by editors, reviewers, mentors, and colleagues that there was limited interest in such “peripheral issues” in mainstream public administration. There are few international scholars who have not been told at some point in their career that if they want to get published, they should pursue academic agendas that their western colleagues understand, desire, and cherish; decolonization has never been a part of such an agenda.

Now that our American colleagues have finally realized that public administration is a discipline that is founded upon and has been perpetuating colonial logic throughout its checkered history, we should be grateful and pretend that they have “discovered” decolonization just like a continent full of people was discovered a few hundred years ago by an incompetent voyager. We should not be spoilsports and point out that even now the apparent move toward decolonization in American public administration is mostly reactionary and primarily oriented toward its local audiences. International scholars are neither the primary focus nor the primary drivers of this movement. We are again forced with the same choice of “show up or shut up.” So, here I am, showing up like a good boy and jumping on the bandwagon! All hail decolonization!

Before I move on, I must note that I understand that “American scholars” is a heterogeneous category and includes many people fighting for their own decolonization based on disciplinary or demographic exclusions and care deeply for the decolonization of public administration. I consider them my partners in a transnational coalition of outsiders who continue to bang their heads against the inertia of colonialism and functionalism in public administration. In fact, they are much more of a partner than some international scholars who insist on continuing with disciplinary amnesia about the historical injustices and colonial logic of governance in public administration.

The structure of labor between the empire and its periphery

Decolonization, first and foremost, aims at contesting the foundational colonial logics of public administration and the division of labor between the empire and its periphery (not just geographical but also ideological and demographic). In this division of labor, the empire is the site of all knowledge production, and the periphery is the wasteland where the external validity of this knowledge is tested. The empire decides who gets to speak, what can be studied, and what the rules are for speaking and studying. To sum up, the empire gets to decide how governance can be imagined and practiced in the world. The periphery and all its residents are told to be grateful to be allowed the gift of imperial transfer of knowledge. The chosen few from the periphery are trained in the ways of the empire and after internalizing this message return home to bring with them the civilizing message to their impressionable publics. “I have been to the promise land and back! I have seen how the emperors think and behave! Listen to me and there might be hope for us all!”

Due to this division of labor in public administration, panels on international and global public administration are organized when the international and global audiences are sleeping while scholars from the west tell each other how best to decolonize public administration and increase its global outreach. In this division of labor, global audiences are asked to defer their sleep, log on to their computers and listen to the emperors tell them about their own problems and their best solutions which have been reached magically without their meaningful input. In this division of labor, most gatekeeping positions of the discipline belong to the western European and American academics who get to decide what is worthy of inclusion in the disciplinary discourse. The gatekeepers, to their credit, take the time to include tokens from a geographical and demographic periphery in their discourses, panels, and conferences to make sure no one can point out the fundamental asymmetry of the disciplinary power. Those chosen as tokens of inclusion are generally thoughtful individuals who cannot believe their luck at being selected as representatives of the periphery and think that their inclusion in the panels, conferences, and publications will make a difference to the overall direction of the discipline. Amidst the spectacle, they forget that they are there to be seen, not heard. The appreciative faces they see, the social media likes they receive, and the encouraging comments they hear are not for them. All of that is self-congratulation by their western colleagues for being so generous and understanding as to welcome people from the periphery into their fold. Now that their charity work is done, these audiences move on to discussing their “real work” which determines the disciplinary discourse.

Like them, the articles scholars from the periphery write and publish are tokens of inclusion that are not to be read but simply for being celebrated for being there. If you have any doubts, go and read Candler et al.’s (2010) article on epistemic colonialism, easily one of the best articles ever written in public administration about the decolonization of the discipline, which has been cited for a grand total of 36 times since its publication more than a decade ago. If you have any lingering doubts, go to Google Scholar and confirm this and then tell me that a good scholarship is going to make a difference in decolonizing the disciplinary agenda and division of labor in public administration. The publications of many other scholars from the periphery which focus on decolonization tell a similar story. The simple reality is that no one is interested in dismantling this division of labor and the sooner non-western scholars realize it, the easier will their lives be.

Voice, pedagogy, and organization

If western civilization and culture are responsible for colonial racism, and Europe itself has a racist structure, then we should not be too surprised to find this racism reflected in the discourses of knowledge that emanate from this civilization and that they work to ensure that structural dominance is maintained (Sardar, 2008, p. xv)

The purpose of this lament is not just to point out the naivety of our American colleagues. It is also a call for action for those of us who are from or live in, the ideological, demographic, and geographical periphery. No one is coming to help us, and no one cares whether our voices and concerns are meaningfully included in the disciplinary agenda or not. If we keep waiting for the goodwill of our American colleagues, we will simply be reinforcing the structural division of labor between the empire and its periphery. We must act on our own and without waiting if we want to engage in meaningful decolonization of the discipline.

I understand that the first instinct of most of us would be that we should produce scholarship that focuses on the goals of decolonization in public administration. I do not think, on its own, such a scholarship is going to make a difference. Many thoughtful individuals have tried this over the last few decades with limited impact on the overall disciplinary discourse (Alkadry, 2002, 2004; Amoah, 2012; Binderkrantz, 2011; Candler et al., 2010; De Maria, 2005, 2008; Gulrajani, 2010; Gulrajani & Moloney, 2012; Imas, 2005; Kalu, 2004; Kirk-Greene, 1980, 1999; Moore, 2001; Singh, 2005; Subramaniam, 1996, 2000; Thadhani, 2005). While scholarship is important, it is easy to overestimate its power as an academic. As long as the governing logics of public administration remain unchanged, gatekeepers of the empire can keep publishing one “decolonizing” article in every issue for the rest of their lives but it will not make a meaningful difference to the overall disciplinary logics of exclusion and erasure. Perhaps, voice, pedagogy and organization offer better alternatives to pursue this agenda in the long-term.

First, simply calling out disciplinary exclusions, erasures and discrimination is perhaps the most important first step in the decolonization of public administration. Too many of us are afraid to be in the bad books of our western colleagues. We see calls for papers, panel choices, editorial positions, and reviewing choices that fall way short of providing an even playing field for scholars belonging to demographic, ideological, and geographical margins in public administration. Whether it is a reviewer asking an international researcher to justify the relevance of their findings to western readers, a panel of western scholars telling us about international public administration, or gatekeepers with functionalist worldview dismissing critical scholarship in the discipline, we should start calling out these actions for what they are, a continuation of the colonial division of labor between the empire and its periphery. Only by calling out these actions, do we have any hope of destabilizing the taken for granted normality of such exclusionary practices.

Second, while the empire controls what is allowed to be published, it has still limited control over what we teach. Our teaching should reflect a commitment to effective decolonization. This goes beyond including a few readings about colonialism in a course and extends to the heart of organizing the logic of teaching. An instructor can include the best readings about colonialism in a course and end up marginalizing and excluding students from the periphery in their class. In fact, an excellent course on decolonization can be organized with existing syllabi in public administration if the instructor simply encourages students to point out the erasures, exclusions, and silences in those readings. Santis’ (2020, 2021) excellent work is an excellent example in this regard.

Another important thing to keep in mind in the context of decolonization and pedagogy is that not a lot of us are cognizant of our own biases and privilege as instructors or are comfortable talking about them in class. This keeps class discussions on power, privilege, diversity, and inclusion terribly abstract and, at some level, a little disingenuous. It is easy to talk about White, middleclass men but how many of us talk about other forms of privilege in our classes that do not conform to the western understandings of power and privilege. I belong to a region, for example, where being a Punjabi, Sunni Muslim carries a lot of social privilege and if I do not engage with those axes of identity in a discussion on decolonization and privilege, any critique of “White middleclass men” would have little relevance for my students. In fact, exclusively discussing decolonization of identity through the “White middleclass men” discourse privileges one particular context of colonization over other significant and emerging forms of colonization that may be more pertinent in other parts of the world. Understanding and reflecting on our different forms of privilege and being able to acknowledge and discuss them in our classes should be an important part of decolonizing pedagogies.

At a fundamental level, any decolonization of public administration must involve a critical reflection on the fundamental goals of teaching and research in public administration. Too many public administration departments take a functional view of governance and bureaucracy for granted and think that their primary purpose is to train future public servants to work in an efficient, effective manner. This framing of public administration education completely ignores the fact that many governments around the world are unjust, exclusionary, and non-democratic. It also ignores the fact that public administration, as a discipline, was historically organized in many parts of the world as part of a broader colonial empire and it still serves the same function in many ways. It is difficult to take the functional approach toward public administration seriously in such societies. Do we have good theories about public administration in non-democratic societies? What is public administration in societies, where there is no category of the “public” as it is used in the American literature? How can one take the policy process seriously in a society where every word of the king or the dictator becomes law? What is the role of public servants in such societies? Our courses have no answer to such questions because these have not been asked or answered to a meaningful extent in the discipline.

Thoughtful students belonging to the periphery have limited interest in making unjust regimes in their societies work more efficiently, which is what most public administration departments want them to do. Instead, students from such areas are interested in understanding and imagining different ways of governing and re-orienting the citizen-state relation in their societies. At present, our classes do not allow such conversations because they take a western democratic administration context for granted. Importantly, even in western contexts, the notion that all governments are working for the betterment of all sections of society stands on very flimsy grounds as evidence mounts about the inherently exclusionary colonial logic of governance in these regions as well (Alexander & Stivers, 2020; Heckler, 2017; Ray, Herd, & Moynihan, 2022; Roberts, 2020; Santis, 2018).

Given these social and geographical realities, the fundamental purpose of public affairs education must be to help our students understand what kind of a society they live in and nurturing a critical consciousness among them to reflect on their own citizenship, privilege, and belonging in their communities. At a fundamental level, the students graduating from our departments must be able to reflect on their duties in unjust societies and governing regimes. Especially at the graduate level, our students must be able to critically reflect on the nature and history of bureaucracy as an organizational form and an institutional governing apparatus. Naturally, this would involve analyzing the historical role of bureaucracy in different societies and during various epochs. In a public affairs program in which Weber is included but Kafka isn’t or where bureaucracy is suddenly discovered in nineteenth-century Europe or magically conceptualized by its illegitimate American father, Woodrow Wilson, there is limited hope for decolonization.

A critical part of the curriculum in all public affairs schools, anywhere in the world, should be self-reflection in which students who want to work in the public sector critically consider their role not only as future civil servants but also as citizens of a society. In other words, our students should be able to answer a simple question for themselves: “Am I going to be contributing towards more efficient working of an autocratic or exclusionary or unjust system or am I going to work towards creating a better society and a just system of governance for everyone in my society?” As Foucault (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982) famously noted, “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does” (p. 187). Our students should not be among such people who thoughtlessly subscribe to public service careers without understanding that they contribute to more efficient functioning of unjust regimes.

At the postgraduate or doctoral level, it is critical that we allow students, especially those belonging to the developing or previously colonized societies the freedom to ask their own questions and pursue their own research agendas instead of giving them prefabricated western theories and research questions. Public administration research almost always assumes Western traditions of administration to be the only authentic and correct way of thinking about administration. Given this assumption, the administrative apparatuses of non-western civilizations, which lasted centuries before Weber was even born, are dismissed as pre-modern non-bureaucracies. Similarly, the influence of these traditions on the genealogy of modern public administration is usually completely disregarded. One fruitful area of inquiry for future research is to document these alternative administrative traditions to see if they can help provide useful insights into contemporary governance challenges, especially in non-western contexts. Haque’s analysis of administrative traditions in Southeast Asia (2004, 2007), Im, Campbell, and Cha’s (2013) discussion of the historical evolution of Korean bureaucracy, and Drechsler’s work on Chinese (2018), and Islamic (2013, 2015) traditions of public administration provide a useful starting point in this regard. Understanding how the colonial experience changed both ex-colonizers and the ex-colonies, especially the character of bureaucratic institutions, is an important unfulfilled research agenda within public administration. If a truly inclusive public administration is to emerge, the only meaningful way for it to happen is through new paths taken by people who have not internalized the existing institutional logic of public administration.

Finally, it is critical that international scholars interested in public administration and governance start getting better organized. Most academic associations of public administration scholars are only interested in western research agendas and focus primarily on domestic stakeholders. International scholars from the global south-east participating in such conferences often have to find visibility by working on research agendas that are led almost exclusively by western scholars. In other words, the only position available to them is that of a follower and never that of a leader. Indeed, most western public administration academics would be hard pressed to find examples of mainstream theories in the discipline where international scholars from the global south-east were considered disciplinary leaders.

While international scholars dutifully attend panels focused on western disciplinary agendas at every conference, the same courtesy is often not extended to the infrequent panels focusing primarily on non-western public administration. The underlying assumption of such practices is that our western colleagues have nothing useful to learn from non-western paradigms or dynamics of governance unless it is framed through western theories and perspectives. It is similarly rare to see special issues that focus exclusively on research agendas relevant to the concerns of the global south-east in top public administration journals. Until we start pointing out these patterns of exclusion and there is an academic association that truly represents the concerns of all public administration researchers, there is limited hope for such practices to change.

An important reason for these patterns of the disciplinary organization is that there are simply not a lot of international public administration scholars doing critical work. It has certainly nothing to do with the number of thoughtful individuals in the global south-east interested in bureaucracy, governance, and public administration. Many scholars in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia (Drechsler, 2005, 2013, 2015, 2018; Khan & Adonis, 2021; Matsiliza, 2020; Ranta, 2016, 2017, 2022) continue to work in these areas but very little of their scholarship ends in top public administration journals. Many of them are simply not interested in working or publishing in a small field that defines public administration and governance narrowly through a functional lens. Many of these scholars work in areas where a more critical orientation toward governance is not only warranted but also the only obvious choice available to a thoughtful researcher. Public administration journals, however, provide limited space for such scholarship. If public administration is to attract thoughtful critical work from international scholars, gatekeepers of the discipline must change their attitude toward critical theoretical decolonial work.

Afterword: A psychoanalytic self-critique

The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open … thenon! … therhood!’ It was the golden age. (Sartre, 1963, p. 7)

All academics in public administration are confronted with the symbolic order (or governing rules) of the discipline that maintains the status-quo and affirms allegiance to neoliberalism and neocolonialism. For most scholars, this symbolic order works perfectly as it provides them with a legible identity, a livelihood, and a telos, and that is all they desire from it. For a few unfortunate souls, the gaps in the disciplinary symbolic order are too much and too large to be ignored. So, they try to suture such gaps in the symbolic order with the imaginary ideals of rebellion and contestation to retain their fabricated sanity. These imaginary ideals, as the name implies, allow people like me to entertain the fantasy that we are different from the “sell outs” even though we continue to draw salaries from the same neocolonial institutions and try to publish in the same journals thriving on profit-maximizing neocolonial capitalist practices of exclusion. Maybe imaginary ideals like “decolonization” are our coping mechanism to suture the symbolic order of public administration. Maybe our identities are so tied to the discipline that we do not see through the deceptive self-serving ruse; we are also trying to sanitize the discipline so that we do not need to think about the colonial logic of governance of our universities, our journals, and our academic grants.

Maybe that is why the disciplinary gatekeepers allow some of us to entertain our imaginary ideals of decolonization and the occasional foray into non-western knowledge as long as we do not disrupt the current organization of academic scholarship. They know these imaginary ideals do not really change anything. If anything, they further strengthen the status-quo because no one cares what you think or care about as long as our teaching or scholarship does not disrupt the fundamental organization of the disciplinary division of labor. That is why, what we write is often immaterial as long as we—and the work we do—are positioned and re-appropriated by the same industry we are supposedly trying to dismantle. People like us are similar to the cultists who come together at night and entertain fantasies of rebellion against their and then dutifully go to work for the empire in the morning. All of us know that the neocolonial capitalist empire that keeps us employed is our real master. In reality, as our critiques about decolonizing governance and public administration get published in a language our people do not understand, and in profit-maximizing journals formed on a structural division of labor between the empire and its periphery, we congratulate ourselves for doing heroic work, we are too eager to kiss the ring of the emperor while closing our eyes and fantasizing about wearing it ourselves one day. The emperor smiles and praises us for “keeping it real” and providing some much-needed entertainment in an otherwise dull academic industry.

After-afterward: Voice, dialogue, and the spirit of public administration

A very thoughtful reviewer recommended clarifying that this essay is an example of using one’s voice in academic writing and establishing the polemic purposes of the critique offered here. One purpose of this essay is, indeed, to use my voice by “writing differently” (Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen, 2019) to hopefully spur a conversation around the division of labor between the empire and its periphery in public administration. However, a deeper purpose of this essay is to contest the spirit, the vital principle, the life-giving force, and the general ideology of public administration research. As Evink (2000, p. 129) notes, spirit is “the energy that excites us and provides enthusiasm for our life's work.” The purpose of this polemic is to argue that spirit of public administration is broken and unless the foundational logic of the discipline is changed, it will be difficult for people like me to turn up for work because, to follow the title of Anderson’s (2000) thoughtful essay, “This place hurts my spirit!”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Azfar Nisar

Muhammad Azfar Nisar is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Lahore University of Management Sciences. His research focuses on administrative burden, decolonization, inclusion, and identity.