Commentary on human rights and public administration

The following commentary is from a roundtable about the relationship between public administration and human rights published in Perspectives in Public Management and Governance in November 2023. Access the roundtable here.

Three Frontiers, Three Barriers

Alasdair Roberts

What is the point of public administration?  What larger good are we trying to accomplish, as scholars and practitioners in this field?  We do not talk about these questions as much as we should.  In the United States especially, the field of public administration has shifted its focus away from macro-level questions about the role of the state.  One result is that we lack a shared vocabulary—an inventory of concepts—that allows us to talk about these larger goals.

One way to remedy this problem is by improving our fluency in the language of human rights.  This is a universal language, used around the world, that has evolved over the last eighty years.  The language of human rights does not address every question relating to the role of the state.  But it certainly allows us to have a better conversation about the role of the state in promoting a just society.  We can even say that one of the distinctive features of the modern state — the sort of state that emerged after World War II — is its obligation to respect human rights.  Obviously, some states fail egregiously to meet this obligation.  But even the worst performing states feel the need to defend their conduct in the language of human rights.

In 2022, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance invited scholars to contribute papers that explore the connection between public administration and human rights — how public administrators can contribute to the advancement of human rights on one hand, and how ideas about human rights shape administration on the other.  At the same time, the journal invited nine scholars from around the world to contribute short commentaries about the relationship between public administration and human rights.  They are collected within this roundtable. 

The commentaries that follow identify three frontiers for research on this topic. The first frontier relates to the question of basic services.  What are the fundamental obligations of governments toward the people who live under their authority?  In some countries in the Global South, this question is being answered by reference to theories of human rights.  In India, for example, practitioners and scholars talk with increasing frequency about rights-based administration and rights-based development.  A range of important initiatives have been launched in India to give meaning to those concepts in fields such as employment, education, and food security.  The same framework of rights-based administration could easily be applied by scholars to describe developments in the Global North.  For example, the post-World War II project of building modern welfare states was essentially concerned with advancing rights-based administration, as is present-day work in the United States on inclusion and social justice.

The second frontier highlighted in these commentaries relates to the search for justice for Indigenous peoples.  Scholars in public administration have not given enough attention to the historical role of public administration in supporting processes of colonization and subjugation of Indigenous peoples.  This is beginning to change, but slowly.  Research on historical practices, and on contemporary initiatives to render justice to Indigenous peoples, is largely absent from top-ranked journals in public administration and public policy.  We can easily do better, by giving more attention to the important work on restorative justice and Indigenous self-governance that is being done in several countries today.

The third frontier explored in this roundtable might be the most familiar.  It relates to the worldwide challenge to liberal democracy, which is one of the central pillars of human rights doctrine.  The world has changed fundamentally from the late 1990s, when liberal democracy seemed to be making progress everywhere.  In fact, we probably suffered from hubris in that era.  The last twenty years have reminded us that liberal democracy cannot be taken for granted.  If we want it, we must fight for it. This is as true for scholars in public administration as it is for anyone else.  We are in one of those moments in history when it is imperative that we should stand up for human rights and find ways of integrating human rights into public administration discourse and practice.  To do this, there are three barriers that must be overcome.

The first barrier is an unwillingness among many scholars to get involved in subjects that seem to involve difficult questions about politics and ethics.  In graduate school, many of us learned how to demonstrate the hollowness of the politics-administration dichotomy.  In scholarly practice, though, we often rely on it.  We operate on the premise that if we structure our work the right way, we can sidestep fuzzy problems of morality and values and get on with the business of producing durable scientific truths. However, it is impossible in our field to make such a clean separation between science and morality.  Moreover, the refusal to take a stand on questions of human rights, at a moment when those rights are in serious jeopardy, is an abdication of our responsibilities: as scholars, as human beings, and — for some of us — as privileged citizens of the Global North.

The second barrier that must be addressed is a tendency toward provincialism within American public administration.  This unfortunate tendency has effects around the world because American scholars exercise disproportionate influence over major journals and associations in the field of public administration. Provincialism is not the same as exceptionalism, the usual charge against American scholarship.  Exceptionalism is the belief that American history is qualitatively different from the history of other countries.  Exceptionalism is necessarily comparative: to make the claim that the United States is exceptional, a person must have some conception of what other countries are like.  Provincialism, by contrast, grows out of indifference about the experience of other countries.  There is no effort to compare and contrast.

Provincialism in American public administration scholarship is sometimes evident in its approach to fundamental rights.  American scholars of public administration do not usually talk about human rights.  More often, they talk about rights using an American vernacular.  Where scholars in other countries might invoke the vocabulary of human rights, American scholars are more likely to talk about American values, constitutional liberties, social equity, and social justice. An illustration of this practice is provided by the strategic plan released in 2023 by NASPAA, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration.  NASPAA has ambitions to set standards for public affairs programs around the world.  The strategic plan says: “Diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility are at the core of NASPAA’s identity.”  This is an example of American vernacular at work.  NASPAA could have defined these critical core values using the more inclusive language of human rights.  In fact, it would make sense to do this, given NASPAA’s aspiration to be a global standard-setter. However, there is no mention of human rights anywhere in its strategic plan or accreditation standards.

A third obstacle to bridge-building between human rights and public administration is a simple lack of knowledge about human rights among scholars of public administration, particularly in the Global North.  In general, we operate with a layperson’s understanding of human rights.  There are few if any courses on human rights and public administration, and there are no conference tracks on the subject.  If we want to take human rights seriously, it will be necessary to improve our knowledge about how the concept of human rights has evolved over decades, and what it means today.

In December 2022, more than thirty academic bodies endorsed a statement to mark Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the day on which the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  That statement said:

As scholars and practitioners working in the field of public administration, we mark this day by reaffirming our commitment to human rights and fundamental democratic freedoms. We believe in the inherent dignity of all people and that all people have equal, inalienable rights. These beliefs guide our research, teaching, and engagement in public affairs.

This is a first step toward the goal of infusing our work with a concern for human rights.  The next steps are to improve our understanding of what concern for human rights entails, and to identify the frontiers on which we can make the most useful contributions to fulfilling human rights in practice.