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ABSTRACT
The Philippines was the first country to offer Public Administration (PA) degree programs in Asia beginning in 1952. PA programs were offered by the newly established Institute of Public Administration at the University of the Philippines (UP) in 1951, in line with the Bell Mission’s recommendations to rebuild the civil service and facilitate recovery from World War 2. Since then, Philippine PA education has evolved with the changing political, administrative, and economic landscape. PA programs have expanded across the country, and PA professional and educational associations have grown. Despite these, obstacles limit their development and challenge their relevance. The general environment of PA education in the Philippines remains, in my view, fragmented, impeded by regulatory issues, dependent on imported theories, ideas, and frameworks due to centralized and limited indigenous scholarship. PA programs face questions on the suitability of its curricula to the needs of students and the public sector. Finally, it must deal with the question of whether PA, as it is taught and practiced, is responsive to the needs of the Philippine bureaucracy and society. Several options in dealing with these challenges are proposed and explored in this article.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to express gratitude to my colleagues who directly and indirecty provided their feedback and suggestion to this mansucript. Special thanks goes to Dr. Gary Ador Dionisio, Ms. Maricel Fernandez-Carag, Dr. Joan Tomas-Ruiz, and Dr. Noel Tarrazona, who provided valuable feeback and inputs during the writing of this manuscript. All views expressed in this article belong to the author and in no way represents the official views of any organization or association. All errors in this article belong to the author.
Notes
1. It was conferred the name National College of Public Administration by the UP Board of Regents in its 1126th meeting on 26 November 1998.
2. Not all of the registered members are active. This figures represent the number of institutions that have registered for membership in ASPA at one time or another since the 2000s.
3. I note that the issues and challenges of Philippine PA are significantly different from the “Grand Challenges” documented by Gerton and Mitchell (Citation2019) in their article “Grand challenges in public administration: Implications for public service education, training, and research” published in this journal.
4. The Center for Integrative and Development Studies (CIDS) in the University of the Philippines, a center whose early history is tied to the GSPA, also publishes a journal titled Philippine Journal of Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Development Perspectives but this is not strictly a PA journal. It is also locally published and is yet to be indexed by Scopus or SSCI.
5. A single volume of Principles and Practices of Public Administration in the Philippines was also published by Rex Bookstore in 2011.
6. Relative to other social science disciplines in the Philippines, internationally refereed and indexed publications in the field of Public Administration in the Philippines by Filipino scholars is relatively low in number.
7. Other prominent institutions like the DAP and ASoG are not included here as technically not focused on Public Administration and they offer MPM rather than MPA programs.
8. Areas of specialization in the UP NCPAGs MPA program include Public Policy and Program Administration, Organization Studies, Fiscal Administration, Local Government and Regional Development, Voluntary Sector Management, Public Enterprise Management, and Spatial Information Management.
9. Specialization in DAPs MPM program include Health Systems and Development, Development and Security, Rural Development, among others. Tracks for the AsoG MP Program include Governance, Health Governance, Technology-based Enterprise Development, Environmental Governance and Sustainable Development, and Rural Development, among others.
10. Executive master’s degree programs tend to have compressed class hours compared to regular programs, students tend to be in supervisory or managerial positions, the program is part-time and students expected to return to their work between sessions, and outputs are typically work-based capstone projects instead of the usual master’s thesis.
11. While there are schools of thought in that categorizes PA under Management and institutions offering PA in their Business and Management units, this is neither a universal or dominant view. The more dominant schools of thought either places PA as a field of Political Science or as a separate and distinct field in and of itself.
12. This can either be a master’s degree in Public Administration or a bachelors degree in Public Administration combined with as master’s degree in Social Science or Management.
13. A few faculty members also feature prominently in CSOs, like the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) and the Social Watch Philippines.
14. The Philippine government also established in 1988 by virtue of Executive Order 262 and later amended by the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Act of 1990 (RA 6975) a Local Government Academy (LGA) “responsible for human resource development and training of local government officials and personnel for the Department proper and the local government bureaus including regional field offices”.
15. I make a distinction here between Philippine PA scholar-practitioners, many of whom are actively engaged in public policy and governance work, and Philippine PA scholarship, which pertains to the body of published scholarly work in the discipline.
16. For example, my own research work is limited to assessing the Strategic Performance Management System (SPMS) and the Performance-Based Incentive System (PBIS) under the RBPMS (Torneo & Mojica, Citation2019).
17. For example, some still utilize the outdated New Public Management paradigm, which is arguably outdated having been “new” for the last four decades.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ador R. Torneo
Ador R. Torneo is a Professor of Political Science and Development Studies, and Director of the Jesse M. Robredo Institute of Governance of De La Salle University in Manila Philippines. He served as a Director for Internationalization of the Korea Association for Policy Studies (KAPS) in 2017 and as the (National) Secretary of the Philippine Political Science Association from 2017-2019. He is a regular member of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and a lifetime member of the Philippine Society for Public Administration (PSPA).