Internationalizing public administration education: Why and how?
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/01447394221092276 |
| Author | Allison C White |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Teaching Public Administration
2023, Vol. 41(2) 190–220
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/01447394221092276
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Internationalizing public
administration education: Why
and how?
Allison C White
Master of Public Policy and Administration Program, International Policy and Management Specialization,
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO¸USA
Abstract
Public administration educators in the United States have renewed their interest in
incorporating an international perspective into their teaching. Why is this perspective
important for students and how can educators integrate it meaningfully? In this article, I
provide an argument for the internationalization of public administration curricula,
generate nine “principles of practice”to help guide internationalization efforts, and specify
two broad strategies through which an international dimension can be integrated into
public administration curricula—one for leveraging comparative material in domestically-
focused curricula and another for developing a distinct and standalone internationally-
focused specialization.
Keywords
Internationalization, imperialism, pedagogy, curriculum, high-impact practices
Introduction
For much of its early history, the field of public administration in the United States was
oriented around a national perspective. Comparative cases were present from the in-
ception of the discipline but were often drenched in racism, condescension, and imperial
thinking, traits anathema to modern public service values (Roberts 2020). In recent
decades, public administration education has benefited from an increasing awareness of
and appreciation for the importance of a global perspective in the training of pub-
lic servants (see, e.g. Klinger and Washington 2000;Devereux and Durning 2001;
Corresponding author:
Allison C White, Colorado State University, Campus Delivery 1701, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1701¸ USA.
Email: allison.white2@colostate.edu
Miller-Millesen and Mould 2004;Ryan 2010;Hou et al., 2011;Murphy and Meyer 2012;
Jennings and White 2018;Haque and Gunther-Canada 2018;Baracskay 2021). This
widening of aperture is a welcome development, but progress toward genuine interna-
tionalization
1
will mean taking care to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In this article, I argue
that taking internationalism seriously means treating the study of public administration in
domestic and foreign contexts as two halves of the same, holistic, global enterprise.
Contemporary public service values such as respect, equity, and inclusion must never be
allowed to (re)succumb to the hierarchical and purely transactional approach of an earlier
era, during which the experiences of other countries were valued only as a resource for
improving public administration “at home.”
Why is an international perspective essential and how can educators integrate it into
their curricula? To answer these questions, I proceed in three stages. First, I excavate the
earliest contours of an international perspective in public administration to highlight the
risks of “doing”internationalization poorly. I focus on public administration education in
the United States for reasons of tractability and positionality. Second, I introduce several
broad justifications for internationalizing the field of public administration. Third, I use
my arguments in favor of an internationalized curricula to guide the formulation of a set of
principles of practice that, in turn, imply concrete strategies for internationalization. I
group the principles of practice into overarching approaches: one for leveraging com-
parative material in domestically-focused curricula and another for developing a distinct
and standalone internationally-focused specialization. The latter approach is illustrated
through a case study of the International Policy and Management specialization of
Colorado State University’s Master of Public Policy and Administration (MPPA)
program.
I adopt the perspective of a reflective practitioner throughout (Schon 1983,1987;
Harper 2018). Thus, this article is not intended to be the “last word”on internationalizing
public administration education, but rather aims to stimulate more thoughtful and in-
novative curricula design. The intervention provided here is meant as one step in an
iterative process of recommitting the discipline to a thoughtful, sensitive, and sophis-
ticated version of internationalism.
Historical origins of the international dimensions of public
administration education
In 1887, the future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (then a history and political science
professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania) published his now-famous article on
public administration as a field of academic inquiry. In it, Wilson called for a deliberately
comparative approach to the study of public administration, believing that civil servants at
home should look abroad to identify best practices. “Of ourselves,”he wrote, “so long as
we only know ourselves, we know nothing”(Wilson 1887:p. 220; Cf. Sadler 1900).
Although a federal system like the United States facilitates interstate comparisons, Wilson
argued that Americans could only grasp the strengths and weaknesses of domestic ad-
ministration through comparative studies that included foreign polities. “We can never
White 191
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