Public Service Education and the University’s Role in Development Management

Abstract

A vital and widely recognized aspect of development is the recruiting, training, and maintaining of a pool of skilled, committed professionals for the public sector. From this perspective, fundamentally it is people-their skill, training, dedication, drive, and their status and selfesteem-who invest visions of development with meaning and reality. This link between human resources and development needs and goals is well accepted. There is, however, far less concensus about the institutional famework in which that link is best forged. As a result, there is a broad array of alternative approaches to training for public management purposes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current status of the more common alternatives in current use. Our discussion suggests that the diverse institutional arrangements that have emerged over the last several decades reflect less the variation in politically defined direction and objective needs than the cultural-historical context in which institutions have been built.