It is assumed that public sector organisations will act in a professional way in the execution of their daily tasks. However, the contrary is experienced when assessing the performance of local government in South Africa. Municipal service delivery is often plagued by alleged financial irregularities, maladministration, corruption, mismanagement, service delivery protests and lack of trust by citizens. To improve this situation, it is proposed that particular competencies and capabilities be acquired by employees to promote more professional conduct; that an environment of more responsiveness, high performance and clear accountability be created; a culture of really putting people first be inculcated; financial sustainability and management be ensured; and that institutional capacity be improved through direct and indirect support interventions.
This article points to the adverse circumstances in which public administration education and training has to take place in developing countries, more specifically in South Africa. This is especially seen in the combination of scarce resources and rapidly increasing enrolment. The consequence thereof is that the didactics of education and training suffer in becoming characterized by mere teaching instead of the promotion of learning.The article points to a serious dilemma especially faced under such difficult circumstances, namely that a curriculum either addresses all the subjects relevant from an academic perspective and conform to international accreditation criteria, and becomes deficient in the way all these topics are taught-or opts to prioritize topics based on a skills-needs analysis and optimizes the way in which this limited number of topics is learned.
The decolonialisation of the higher education curriculum and free higher education were two of the burning issues during student protests that erupted across universities in South Africa at the end of 2015. Although the president announced free higher education in December 2017, the country can scarcely afford it, with many universities already feeling financial constraints. The call for decolonialisation of the curriculum by students (which was viewed negatively by the public) refers specifically to books, theories and learning content that still predominantly reflect the thoughts of Western colonial powers. Students required a bigger focus on indigenous (African) knowledge to be incorporated into the South African curriculum. This, however, is the opposite of current international trends, where curricula are developed to meet international or even global standards that are set by international accreditation agencies in Public Administration, such as the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and the International Commission on Accreditation of Public Administration Education and Training Programs. Therefore, this article investigates not only the direction the discipline of Public Administration is taking with regard to international standards and the curricula, but also to specifics of governance in developing countries. Are there reasonable arguments to support the demand for changes to the content of this discipline and is there a need to adjust curricula to concede to the wishes of the protesting students for the decolonising of science? This article found that international scholarly requirements, specific national conditions for governance and the demands uttered by students in the development of curricula at South African universities are at odds, particularly in the study of Public Administration.
Not only did globalization bring about profound changes to public administration worldwide, but it also challenged the implementation of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm in terms of service delivery, posing the question whether public administration must reinvent itself to address these challenges more effectively. Many changes that have been implemented in the public sector have not been based on evidence that change would benefit those using the services, those working in them and the community as a whole. Taking cognizance of especially the current African and South African higher education environment, it became clear that in order to move towards excellence in public administration education and training, the curricula must be amended and should the focus be on particular skills to be transferred to learners to address the above- mentioned situation. The question arises whether the nature of these developments would be relevant to the needs of both the learner as well as public institutions.
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