Introduction

In this chapter I present a possible approach to teaching comparative public administration (hereafter, CPA), based on my own experience as a teacher of this subject in Latin American universities. Training on CPA is quite familiar in master's programs of the region, in which one course of the curricula is usually devoted to the comparative study of public management and public policies. Teaching these courses admits multiple approaches, in terms of goals, contents, and methodologies. Personally, I start CPA courses by asking students about their expectations regarding what they hope to learn at the conclusion of the instruction. The answer is consistently the same: they would like to know how bureaucracies function in other countries, what are their differences with those at their home country, and other similar concerns.

Whether or not this should be CPA's object of knowledge is of course debatable. I anticipate my negative point of view, acknowledging, however, that students’ expectations are justifiable. In effect, these courses are generally taught at an advanced stage in the career, but the usual contents of the core courses of the curricula seldom adopt a comparative focus: the empirical material employed tends to deal with domestic experiences based on issues or phenomena of the country where the programs are offered, with a frequent use of case studies. Students feel quite eager to gain knowledge on how does the state apparatus operate elsewhere, especially because their training seeks to find out the most efficient and effective ways of managing public affairs. Hence, knowledge of other successful cases or experiences appears as a natural correlate of this curricular orientation.

Similarly, the literature in this field reflects, in a way, this same type of concerns. There are dozens of books and countless articles which, under the title of CPA, tend to offer collections of cases – often recommended as best practices – which analyze supposedly successful experiences about how organizational problems have been tackled or solved in public management, demonstrating an insufficient effort to transcend casuistry and search for more general trends and patterns through truly comparative analysis. Other books, like Ferrel Heady's (1998) classic one, focus their analyses on the discussion of the different schools of thought in the field of public administration.