Public administration and development in (historical) perspective

Gender equality and women empowerment are central to academic and policy debates on development. In the spirit of celebrating and reflecting on 75 years of research published by Public Administration and Development (PAD), this article aims to take stock of the journal's contribution to the knowledge base and practice of promoting gender equality. This article reviews research output published in PAD and identifies key themes and perspectives on gender equality and their reflection on the practical implementation of equalising policies. We use thematic analysis to review 43 relevant articles and evaluate the intellectual landscape, shedding light on the journal's contribution to gender equality research. Four broad themes are discussed along with their implications for practice and future research. We highlight the importance of not only expanding the horizons of gender equality research but also developing keen awareness reflected in the scholarship of the changing landscape of gender and the need to balance constructions of gender and the high variability of gender norms and practices in the Global South that should be taken into account when designing policies. This article concludes with recommendations and several questions that invite public administration researchers and policymakers to take this conversation and develop it further through research, education, and practice.

The role of gender equality in advancing development

Xu,

Mussagulova,

Zhou

2024

Changing discourse of public administration: Where PAD stands?

Rajan,

Sen

2024

Public administration in the recent years has become a very dynamic and vast domain owing to evolving challenges. Our study aims to comparatively evaluate the changing discourse in public administration research in general and ‘Public Administration and Development’ (PAD) in particular. For this purpose, we have taken research articles from nine journals of public administration domain for the period of 2010–2022. We have used the text‐mining based approach of Dynamic Topic Modelling to understand the evolution of topics in public administration research. This is followed by the Named Entity Recognition (NER) to discover the geographic importance given in public administration research vis‐à‐vis PAD. We have used the measure of ‘Jaccard similarity’ to compare the changing discourse of PAD with respect to other journals. We have found that topics on approaches to governance, organization performance and health were always on the priority in literature. We have also found that topic coverage in PAD is more diverse and niche compared to the overall trends in public administration research. NER findings suggest that public administration research is more Euro‐North American centric while PAD has pan‐continental presence with focus on developing countries.

Reflections on 75 years of Public Administration and Development

Elliott,

Oliveira,

2024

Public Administration and Development has a unique position in the public administration discipline covering the intersections between the fields of public administration and development studies. As the leading journal on public administration in developing countries with an international perspective, and the second oldest British public administration journal (after Public Administration 1 ), the history of the journal can tell us something about the nature of our discipline and more generally the nature of academic publishing.This 75th anniversary special issue offers an opportunity to reflect on changes to the journal over those 75 years and to look to the future. It also sits alongside the first issue in 1949, the 25th anniversary special issue in 1974 (see Johnston, 1974), and the 50th anniversary special issue in 1999 (see Murray, 1999). It will be another 25 years before we have the opportunity to indulge in such introspection again. We can only speculate as to what the nature of academic publishing will be then, and how those involved with the journal will judge our tenure as editors-in-chief. For now, we are charged with the responsibility of curating the journal in a way that will ensure it continues to flourish.