Public administration has become an increasingly international and comparative
field of study and practice. First, these twin perspectives have done much to enrich
public administration theory in the past generation. The number of refereed journal articles, the range of scholarly journals, and the breadth of their subject matter
have increased remarkably since Huddleston’s (1984) and Cayer and Van Wart’s
(1990) summaries and analysis of extant literature to what is available to contemporary scholars (Fitzpatrick et al., 2010). Second, the inclusion of international
and comparative perspectives have been of inestimable value in the development of
public administration theory, particularly the development and testing of hypotheses reflecting the importance of cross-national characteristics as independent or
intervening variables. Third, and despite the preponderance of refereed journals
published in the United States and Europe, these increases in the amount of international and comparative research have fostered fundamental changes in how we
teach public administration. Although the newly updated National Association of
Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) standards do not require
a focus on the international, they do emphasize the importance of teaching public administration and affairs from a comparative perspective, as defined by the
mission and objectives of a particular graduate degree program (NASPAA, 2009).
Fourth, they have fundamentally altered the practice of public administration in
its varied aspects—policy development, program implementation, and political
leadership. We are arguably the first generation in world history with the ability
to use information and communications technologies to share information, resolve
conflicts, and make decisions at a global level. It is clearly the responsibility of intellectual and political elites to use this capability toward political, social, economic,
and environmental sustainability (Argyriades and Pichardo Pagaza, 2009).