Development Administration: An Overview

Abstract

The concept of ‘development administration’ has been almost exclusively used with reference to the developing nations of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.¹ Perhaps it was first used by Donald C. Stone, although the term was popularised by Riggs and Weidner in the 1960s. Whatever its point of origin, the conceptual genre of development administration has been distinctively Western. Two interconnected Euro-American traditions converge in it. One of these streams of administrative thought is the result of an evolving trend of scientific management that began at the turn of the century with the administrative reform movement. The second current is the somewhat newer trend towards national planning and government interventionism that emerged as a direct consequence of the Great Depression, the Second World War and postwar reconstruction. Events between the collapse of the international economic order in the 1930s and attempts to establish a newer one at Bretton Woods and San Francisco in 1944 and 1945 welded these two currents of administrative thought into a new synthesis that could be termed crisis management and reconstruction administration.