Our 40th Anniversary Celebration was held in two parts:

• Preconference Workshop With New Scholars, September 3-5, 2008, at the original Minnowbrook conference site at Blue Mountain Lake, New York ("Phase One")

• Conference on the Future of Public Administration, Public Management and Public Service Around the world, September 5-7, 2008, at Lake Placid, New York ("Phase Two")

About the original Minnowbrook conference:

In September, 1968, Dwight Waldo, Albert Schweitzer Chair at the Maxwell School, sponsored a conference of young public administration scholars at the Minnowbrook conference site of Syracuse University. Waldo was concerned that “neither the study nor the practice of Public Administration was responding in appropriate measure to mounting turbulence and critical problems” of the day” (Marini, 1971: xiii).

The conference ideas, reflective of the tumultuous sixties, sparked a critical examination of public administration scholarship and practice aptly called the "New Public Administration."   The conference left an enduring legacy for our field.

Then there was Minnowbrook II

In 1988, George Frederickson, Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas (previously a Maxwell professor), spearheaded a conference at the Minnowbrook Center to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the original conference.  Several of the papers were published in edited journal symposia in the years following the conference and continued to challenge the status quo of public administration research and practice.

In 1992 Mary Timney Bailey and Richard T. Mayer published Public Management in an Interconnected World:  Essays in the Minnowbrook Tradition.  According to Mary, "it is a collection of papers that were not accepted for the conference but that clearly influenced the discussion that the 'young' scholars had that day in the boathouse.  It . . . provide[s] a link between [Minnowbrook] I and III, as it focuses on the changing role of public administrators in a complex world." 

And now:  Minnowbrook III

Forty years after the original Minnowbrook Conference we find ourselves with turbulence and critical problems of a different nature. Technological innovations, globalism that permits us to outsource anywhere abroad, devolution that may bring intergovernmental conflict, and new ideas from network theory (to name only a few catalysts) have changed government and governance.

Public managers now find themselves not as unitary leaders of unitary organizations. Instead, they find themselves facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations. In many instances, the needed skill set of public managers has changed to one that heavily emphasizes collaborative problem solving and  negotiation.  These skills have become increasingly important both for network management purposes and as public managers strive to become more deliberative and inclusive.  

In the spirit of Dwight Waldo’s original Minnowbrook conference, we seek to assess how public administration, public management, and public service can better respond to the turbulence and critical problems of our times.

Examples of important questions include: 

·        How is the field of Public Administration different in 2008 from 1968 and 1988? What is Public Administration in 2008?

·        Can we draw important theoretical and empirical conclusions about the market-oriented New Public Management that now has a 30 year history?

·        Given the influx of scholars from many disciplines into Public Administration, is Public Administration closer or farther away from developing a core theoretical base?

·        Has progress been made in resolving the inherent tensions between democracy and bureaucracy that Waldo, Mosher, Redford, and others wrote about?

·        How are new ideas about networked governance and collaborative public management changing the way we look at Public Administration, Public Management and Public Service?  Should they change what we teach in our programs?

·        How has globalization affected our understanding of the key challenges that face the study and practice of Public Administration, Public Management, and Public Service in the United States, the developed world, and developing and transitional countries?

The best papers and critiques will be published as a book to be edited by Rosemary O'Leary,

Soonhee Kim, and David Van Slyke.

We are grateful for conference funding from the following individuals:

Maxwell Dean's Office

Syracuse University Vice President Ben Ware

Maxwell Alum Howard Phanstiel