Future Challenges of Public Administration

Abstract

This article addresses the future theoretical, thematical, empirical, and normative challenges for public administration as a research field. Theoretically, it argues for combining organizational and institutional approaches addressing theories on a meso level, taking the context into account, and stronger links to political science addressing accountability issues as well as the temporal dimension. Thematically, there is a need for more studies on crisis management, unsettled and turbulent situations, wicked issues, and digital governance. Empirically, we argue for studying public administration as “living” political organizations from a design perspective, addressing decision-making in public administration but also going further out in the effect chain, and studying multilevel governance as well as the relations between public administration and other institutional spheres. The normative challenges revolve around the need for rediscovering bureaucracy and the role of public administration in protecting the values of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and merit-based bureaucracy in a period characterized by democratic backsliding.