Strategic Planning Process in Public Administration - Essay Example

Public administration encompasses reconciliation of in-built conflicts between democratic governance and administrative bureaucracy. Bureaucracies stay identical with managerial approaches established on uniform procedures, hierarchical structures and formalization that remain anonymously carried out. Management based bureaucratic strategies include planning, coordinating, controlling, directing and organizing. Public administration also involves behavior based democratic practices embraced from various fields such as sociology and remains utilized within the framework of accountability in democracy.

Most notably, the field has considerably changed since the 1930s to incorporate social equity as an integral part of the government’s mission. In overall, public administration entails the formation and implementation of government or public policies. Public administration faces various complications, issues or barriers to the realization of efficient strategic planning process. A unifying set of principles remain absent in guiding practitioners while past practices remain insufficient in meeting the 21st century challenges.

Hence, the intellectual framework needed to drive forward contemporary public administration as a discipline remains a necessity. It would be difficult to change laws and their cumulative effects also generate perverse outcomes. It becomes complicated to avoid rigidities accumulated over time in relation to rules, norms and laws while conserving the merit of law regimes in strategic public administration planning. Similarly, the field of public administration lags behind changes occurring in today’s practice.

The internal systems of public organizations have low tolerance for risks thus making them to resist change or adapt slowly. Hence, many reforms have not brought about change leaving traditional approaches to restate themselves over time (Bourgon, 2011). The growth of non-governmental service delivery approaches such as loans, transfers, grants, tax credit and insurance comprise today’s bulk government spending. However, these approaches create a gap between service delivery and decisions on funding in the traditional accountability framework since public resources become allocated to organizations and individuals thought as could produce anticipated results.

In this regard, this situation should be mitigated through the establishment of new accountability measures capable of producing desired results. The government lags behind in acting as the principal instrument in providing tangible and direct public services. As a result, complex public results cannot be achieved since public services in the present day remain increasingly intermediate, intangible and indirect. A high level of interdependence and wide dispersion of power remain increasingly uncertain in the presence of networked societies and global economy thereby adding onto the government’s responsibilities of addressing public issues (Holmberg & Rothstein, 2012).

Research activities on public administration add significance to the field’s theoretical base and literature regardless of methodologies used. This follows the fact that public administration as an applied discipline supports various research traditions. However, difference of opinions and conflict continues to exist between practitioners and scholars over the applicability and relevancy of the varying epistemic or research approaches in strategic planning. This raises questions as to whether public administration exists as a political, gendered or social construct or if reality could be an objective occurrence when undertaking strategic planning process (Riccucci, 2010). Open and