Public Management Review

Challenging Public Administration and Management Theory: Emerging Perspectives from Asia and the Global South

1. Introduction and rationale

The global landscape of public administration and management (PAM) is undergoing a profound shift. For decades, the discipline has been anchored in the experiences of Western, industrialized democracies (van der Wal et al. 2021). However, since the 21^st century, the rise of Asia and the increasing strategic importance of the Global South have fundamentally reconfigured the global ecology of administrative practices and management capacity. These regions are no longer passive recipients of administrative orthodoxy; they are active laboratories for governance innovation, driven by rapid economic growth, technological leapfrogging, large-scale bureaucratic reforms and complex socio-political dynamics (Haque 2022).

However, the burgeoning empirical evidence in Asia and the Global South has not yet yielded a commensurate advance in PAM theory building (Van Wart and Cayer 1990; Houston and Delevan 1990; Lan and Anders 2000). PAM research in these settings is characterized by either single-country case studies or a strongly problem-driven and context-specific agenda, often centered on policy and governance challenges such as food policy, poverty reduction, post-conflict reconstruction, and governance transitions, whose topical structure does not align neatly with the mainstream Northern thematic classifications (Gulrajani and Moloney 2011). At the same time, the literature exhibits substantial breadth but limited concentration, suggesting a “wide but not deep” pattern with comparatively weaker theorizing.

It is true that recent years have witnessed a significant growth of articles from Asia and Global South nations in international PAM journals. Nevertheless, much of this scholarship remains conceptually tethered to Northern reference frameworks. Southern cases, for example, are frequently positioned as “applications,” “deviations,” or site-specific illustrations rather than as sources of theory-generative concepts and mechanisms (Ali and Bhuiyan 2022; Bhuiyan 2023). The risk is an asymmetrical division of labor: the Global North supplies “theory” while Asia and the Global South supplies “context,” rather than enabling genuinely co-produced global PAM knowledge and theory.

This special issue (SI) responds to this imbalance by seeking to advance context-sensitive PAM theorizing from Asia and the Global South. Its central premise is that these contexts can both test/critique ‘Northern’ PAM theory and generate new constructs and mechanisms, revise and qualify dominant paradigms by specifying boundary conditions, and motivate alternative problem framings and normative logics that unsettle universalist assumptions in mainstream PAM scholarship. At the same time, the SI does not seek to construct a single theory of Asia and the Global South or an overarching meta-theory applicable to all of these settings. Asia and the Global South encompass highly diverse administrative systems, political regimes, institutional arrangements, historical trajectories, and socio-economic conditions. The SI therefore encourages theoretically informed contributions that take this variation seriously and develop concepts and explanations at an appropriate level of abstraction. Advancing PAM as a diverse endeavor can contribute to the development of international administrative and managerial science (Nisar and Masood 2023). Moreover, a global PAM body of theory that moves beyond a North-South dichotomy can build cumulative knowledge in our discipline through collaborations that collapse geographical, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries, and that can inform some of the most wicked global challenges that we commonly face today (Bhuiyan and Perry 2024).

This special issue is committed to building a global conversation about the future of PAM theory in the pages of PMR. It aims to generate PAM theory from Asian and Global South experiences, revisit and reassess established paradigms in PAM based on Asian and Global South experience, promote comparative strategies across both national and regional and global contexts. Consequently, we invite submissions that engage one or more of the following overarching theoretical questions:

(1) What novel constructs, mechanisms, or process logics become visible when we treat administrative and management practices in Asia and the Global South as starting points for theorizing?

(2) How do emergent patterns in these contexts extend, qualify, or reconfigure mainstream PAM paradigms (e.g., NPM/post-NPM, collaborative governance, Public Service Logic and other value-based approaches, strategic management, digital-era governance, and behavioral public administration)?

(3) Under what conditions do insights travel across contexts (e.g. South–South, South–North, within-region), and what conceptual moves allow comparison without erasing informality, regime diversity, and institutional volatility?

This special issue invites manuscripts with a clear theoretical contribution. This contribution might test established theory, develop new theory, qualify existing theory, or expand established theory. The emphasis is on context-sensitive theoretical development, rather than attempts to formulate a unified or universal meta-theory of public administration and management in Asia and the Global South. Additionally, papers submitted to this special issue should not only carry a theoretical contribution but also explore its implications for policy-making and/or practice.

2. Illustrative topics

Papers are welcome from both established scholars and new researchers and can be both conceptual and empirical in nature. Systematic literature and bibliographic reviews are welcome but only if they contribute to theory development rather than solely describe existing theory.

The editors welcome papers focusing on, but not limited to, the following interconnected areas.

• Value co-creation (including value creation/co-creation, co-design, co-production, public service ecosystems, the metrics of value creation, and the evaluation of value creation in Asian and the Global South societies)
• Rethinking collaboration and collaborative governance in Aisa and the Global South (including partnerships and networks under conditions of power asymmetry, and the dark side of collaboration)
• Strategic management in public organizations (including strategic planning, strategy formulation and implementation, and the links between strategy, public value, organizational performance, and service improvement in non-Western settings)
• Social equity, inclusion, and justice (including equity as a theoretical lens, marginalized voices and social justice, and reckoning with the past)
• Technology, data, and the future of governance (including digital and AI-enabled public services, automation, and algorithmic governance)
• Novel theoretical frameworks and their evolution (including explorations of bounded rationality and administrative behavior, nudging and ethics, and the dynamics of street-level bureaucracy)
• Crisis and disaster governance (including resilience and robustness, institutional adaptation, and ecosystem sustainability)
• Performance management and service improvement (including the dynamics of performance evaluation, value-based approaches to performance, and the metrics of performance)
• Human resource management in non-Western settings (including motivation and retention, gender, and recruitment)

These areas are intended to indicate the breadth of the conversation that the special issue seeks to encourage rather than to define an exhaustive or restrictive list of acceptable topics. Papers addressing other aspects of PAM theory are equally welcome where they make a clear theoretical contribution grounded in experiences from Asia and the Global South.

(contact Guest Editor Rui Mu for list of references)