Public administration education in the

Philippines 1951-2020: History, challenges, and prospects.

Journal of Public Affairs Education, 26(2), 127-149

Torneo, A. R. (2020).

The sole purpose of the article published by Torneo is all about exploring
the history, challenges, and prospects of public administration education
in the Philippines from the year 1951 – 2020. He discusses the origins of
public administration programs in the country, its evolution over time, and
the regulatory, theoretical, and practical challenges they faced. The
articles aims to provide a comprehensive overview about the
development and current state of public administration education in the
country. Thus, this articles’ purpose is to let us know about its various
challenges and prospects in the field around a period of nearly seven
decades from 1951 – 2020.

The articles discusses the brief history of public administration in the

Philippines where it’s stated that modern Philippine PA will celebrate the
70th anniversary of its formal institutionalization in 2021. However, the
term “modern” here is used to refer to PA as it is currently taught and
practiced. This also acknowledges that the kingdoms that later comprised
the Philippines had administrative traditions before colonization, and that
civil service was present in the Spanish colonial government in the 16th
century, and the Malolos Constitution of the Philippine Revolutionary
government in the late 19th century. The article also highlights that the
foundation of modern Philippine PA was laid down by the Philippine Civil
Service Act under the American Colonial government in 1900, but formal
PA education was only introduced after the establishment of the IPA at the
UP in 1951 (Corpuz, 1957; Domingo-Tapales, 2002; Reyes, 2011). The
article also emphasizes that the establishment of the IPA in the UP is a
response to the post-World War 2 recommendations of the Bell Mission for
the Philippines. The mission’s report recommended the revival of the
Philippine bureaucracy that suffered the ravages of the war with colossal
material and personnel losses, by rebuilding and developing its capacity
and confidence as well as to restore its pre-war prestige. The IPA aimed to
train and develop a highly capable cadre of public sector administrators,
managers, and staff to facilitate the country's recovery and development
(e.g., Domingo-Tapales, 2002; Reyes, 2011). The article highlights that
under UP NCPAG's Dean Raul P. De Guzman’s leadership, the Philippine
Society of Public Administration (PSPA) was established in 1977, initially
as a professional association of practitioners dedicated to "better
government and improved public service." It gives also emphasis on the
Association of Schools of Public Administration (ASPAP) was established in
1979 under his leadership, patterned after the National Association of
Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) in the U.S. Dean De
Guzman was also influential in the establishment of the Eastern Regional
Organization for Public Administration (EROPA), a regional association of
PA (Domingo-Tapales, 2002). Since then, program offerings in the
discipline have grown. In 1972, only 15 institutions outside UP offered PA
programs (Domingo-Tapales, 2002; Brillantes & Fernandez, 2008).
Highlighted that as of 2020, this has grown to around 200 colleges and
universities across the country. The academic and professional
community has also increased. The article include some highlights about
how a 151 educational institutions have registered for membership in the
ASPAP as of 2020. The PSPA has grown, and annual conferences are
attended by more than 600 registered and dues-paying members as of
2019. The annual PSPA conferences are among the largest conferences in
the Philippines in the number of attendees.

The articles also emphasized on the growth and development Philippine

Public Administration Education. Where when the IPA was established in
1951, PA programs primarily focused on building the capacities of the
bureaucracy that was severely depleted by World War 2. Initially, training
in the IPA in UP were mainly run by American faculty from the UM with the
assistance of Filipino staff. Highlighted that the programs initially focused
on professional training, but the IPA later offered a Master and Public
Administration (MPA) and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Administration
(BAPA) degree program in 1952. The 1950s and 1960s was the period of
Development Administration (Brillantes & Fernandez, 2008; Cariño, 2008).
The article gives highlight that the 1970s were the period of New Public
Administration (NPA) and saw the return of philosophy and discussions of
social justice and freedom in PA (Cariño, 2008). The article also gives
emphasis on how there is backdrop of poverty, inequality, and absence of
freedoms which occur under President Marcos's authoritarian regime
(1965-1986), which placed the Philippines under Martial law from 1972-
1981. However, the administration adopted major changes in civil service
policy and reorganized the bureaucracy (De Guzman, 1986; Brillantes &
Fernandez, 2008). The article includes the following highlights where the
late former President Marcos appointed some of the brightest minds and
most capable hands the country had to offer in the cabinet and other
important positions as it embarked on large scale infrastructure and
economic development programs. On the other hand, his regime was also
associated with cronyism, corruption, human rights abuses, and the use of
state forces against critics and enemies because of these many faculty
and students, especially from UP, resisted the Marcos regime, leading
protests, and opposing the regime overtly and covertly. Accordingly, UP
CPA engaged in a period of “critical collaboration” working with the
government to reform organizations and make policy decisions, even as it
also studied topics that were not popular with the regime (Tapales-
Domingo, 2002). In the 1960s, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) under
then-Commissioner Subido engaged in the strengthening of the merit
system and efforts against graft and corruption under Philippine President
Macapagal’s moral recovery program (Varela, 1995), added, that in 1963,
the CSC under his leadership required those applying for promotion to
supervisory positions in government to have 12 units of graduate courses
in PA. This increased enrollment in the GSPA in UP and led to the opening
of PA programs and departments in many institutions across the country
(Domingo Tapales, 2002). By 1972, around 16 institutions offered PA
programs across the Philippines. The article highlights some important
details such as the following; The Civil Service Academy offered the
Executive Leadership and Management (ELM) in 1979 (Domingo-Tapales,
2003). The establishment of Development Academy of the Philippines
(DAP) in 1973 as a development-oriented academy for the civilian
bureaucracy tasked with training leaders with new development
perspectives and technologies to support development programs.
American PA schools recognize the implications of continuing to
dichotomize politics and administration, and many transforming into
schools of public policy (De Guzman, 1986; Cariño, 2008). It gives
emphasis on how the ouster of the Marcos regime in the EDSA People
Power Revolution of 1986 led to the restoration of democracy under the
Presidency of Cory Aquino (1986-1992). The new administration
attempted to “de-Marcosify” and reorganized the bureaucracy (Varela,
1995). The Aquino administration led the drafting of the 1987 Constitution
to restore democracy and put strong constitutional safeguards against the
abuses that happened under the Marcos regime. The article also gives
highlights that in the mid-1980s, the number of institutions offering PA
programs in the Philippines increased to around 60 universities, and
colleges offered degree programs in PA mostly as a second area of
specialization at the master's level (De Guzman, 1986). On the other
hand, De Guzman (1986) writes that a course on ethics in the public
service was reintroduced in PA programs, given the emphasis on
accountability in the post-Marcos era. The meaning of “public” in public
administration shifted from “government” to “people,” signaling a shift in
the focus of teaching and research from the problems of the bureaucracy
to broader concerns about the delivery of services to the people where it
includes alternative channels, including the private sector, non-
governmental organizations, cooperatives, and others. The 1987
Philippine constitution officially recognized the importance of non-
governmental, community-based, or sectoral organizations in promoting
the welfare of the nation as state policy. The articles emphasizes that the
New Public Management movement that began in the United Kingdom
and Australia in the 1980s also reached the shores of the Philippines in
the 1990s, followed by the Reinventing Government movement that
started in the US under the Clinton Administration in the early 1990s (e.g.,
see Pilar, 2008). The influence of NPM, Reinventing Government, and
related ideas such as “outsourcing” and “customer orientation” can be
seen in the succeeding Ramos administration (1992-1998), which
embarked on a massive privatization and deregulation program. The UP
NCPAG offered a major in Voluntary Sector Management in its MPA
programs in 1997 in recognition of VSOs as an alternative service delivery
provider and a potential model for PA and in line with the shift of the
discourse in PA to the broader concept of governance (Carino, 1997). The
article also highlight on the challenges and issues starting on even how
strong the heritage and continuing influence of American PA, Filipino
scholars were conscious of the particularities of PA in the Philippines since
the beginning. Even as American PA underwent one of its many periods of
soul searching and “identity crisis” in the 1970s, Filipino scholars did not
find it to be as serious a problem in the local setting (Kirwan, 1977).
Wherein the article has included highlights as of Reyes (1979) notes,
however, that the identity crisis may not be as severe a problem from the
point of view of Philippine PA due to three distinct features: "(a) Public
Administration has maintained some disciplinary independence from allied
disciplines and has not been insecure about its relationships with Political
Science; (b) the politics-administration dichotomy has no strong tradition
and is thus inapplicable here; (c) the peculiarities of a developing country
have necessitated Philippine Public Administration to give emphasis on or
favor to service type researches. Thus, the identity crisis in Public
Administration becomes relevant and worthwhile only if it is viewed from
the perspectives of actual Philippine conditions and development
aspirations" (p.1). However, due to the continuing identity crisis the
Philippine public administration were facing the year 1986, De Guzman
and Onofre D. Corpuz wrote two separate essays entitled, "Is there a
Philippine Public Administration?.” The article emphasize that despite the
increase in the offerings and the number of institutions offering PA
degrees and the growth of Philippine PA's academic and professional
community, many of these questions remained unanswered and
unresolved after 34 years. The salience and relevance of these questions
are reflected in Brillantes and Fernandez's (2009) revisiting of this
question 24 years later. Article highlights that through those continuous
identity crisis within the field of public administration in the country which
was marked by De Guzman (1986), Corpuz (1986), and Brillantes and
Fernandez (2009, 2013) reflect concerns among Philippine PA scholars on
three persistent concerns: the dependence on Western (mostly American)
PA for concepts, models, and theories, the relevance of PA education to
practice, and the responsiveness of Philippine PA to the needs of its
bureaucracy and society, especially in dealing with chronic and persistent
issues such as poverty, inequality, corruption, and the quality of
democracy, governance, leadership, citizenship, and public institutions
(Abueva, 2008). Public administration in the Philippines. The article
discusses that the continued influence of American PA theories and
concepts on Philippine PA may be linked to the limited growth of theory-
oriented and critical indigenous scholarship in the discipline. The IPA
established the Philippine Journal of Public Administration (PJPA) in 1957
as an outlet for scholarly works in the discipline. Despite the increase in
the number of schools offering Doctor of Public Administration (DPA),
there is a shortage of scholarly work geared towards developing
indigenous theories, concepts, or models. As of 2020, there are only a
limited number of available local textbooks on PA in the Philippines. In the
last seven decades, there had been several attempts to develop
indigenous teaching materials on Philippine PA by Filipino scholars. The
article highlights that Pilar (2008) mentions three locally produced
volumes of note published during different periods. These include Arsenio
Talingdan’s Public Administration and Management in the Philippines
(1966), Jose V. Abueva and Raul P. de Guzman’s edited volume
Foundations and Dynamics of Filipino Government and Politics (1967), and
the UP NCPAG’s edited volume, Introduction to Philippine Public
Administration: A Reader, now on its third edition as of 2015. The last
volume was comprised of articles by Filipino PA scholars and local studies
(Pilar, 2008). The article includes the following highlights internationally
published PA scholars remain strongly concentrated among the faculty of
UP NCPAG and a handful of faculty members in DLSU. Although some
scholars publish their work locally, few scholars outside of these
institutions publish their work in internationally refereed, abstracted, and
indexed journals or widely distributed and accessible books on the
discipline. Considering that approximately 200 colleges and universities
offer degree programs in PA, the limited number of scholarly publications
among most of the faculty in these programs is lamentable. Some
colleagues note that faculty in regions like Mindanao tend to use studies
written by scholars based in and for Metro Manila or produced in the US,
Europe, and Asian countries due to lack of published materials grounded
in their local context. According to Sukarno Tanggol (2008), a Muslim PA
scholar notes, the study of PA in the Philippines is for the most part “tilted
towards issues and concerns other than the Muslim minority question” (p.
359) outside the occasional thesis or dissertation and PJPA articles on the
regional governance on the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao
(ARMM). The article includes highlights on organizations of PA and related
fields that were housed in UP NCPAG are as follows the Secretariat for
PSPA, ASPAP, and EROPA are all in UP NCPAG. More recently, a new
organization, the Philippine Public Policy Network (PPPN), was also
established with interim officers and with its first conference hosted by
the college. The journal Asian Review of Public Administration (ARPA),
EROPAs academic journal, is also managed from its Secretariat office, also
located in the college at the Diliman Campus of UP. However, the article
discusses that the proximity between scholars and associations generated
high-quality scholarship and accounts for the close intertwined
relationship between the development of Philippine PA and this institution.
High-quality scholarship in PA, however, has not blossomed elsewhere
despite some earlier efforts to develop PA in the regions. Research, as
reflected in the number of international indexed and peer-reviewed
publications, remains very low among the faculty of other institutions
offering PA outside of this institution. The article deals with ‘The
Education, Regulatory, and Policy Environment,’ stated that many higher
education institutions all over the country offer MPA programs. UP NCPAG
continues to offer MPA programs with several areas of specialization
currently it has three configurations: Plan A, a two-year program with a
thesis, Plan B, a two-year program without a thesis, and Plan C, a one-year
non-thesis program for senior government executives. In highlights that
the UP - Open University (UPOU) and DAP, and private institutions, such as
the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG), offer MPM programs, with
various areas of specialization.11 The College of Public Affairs and
Development of UP-Los Banos Campus offers a Master in Public Affairs.
Many State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) and private institutions offer
MPA programs. Regulatory issues also challenge PA education in the
CHED, the primary governing body that regulates institutions of higher
learning in the Philippines. At present, there is no dedicated CHED
Technical Panel on Public Administration that sets the policies, standards,
and guidelines for relevant program offerings. The regulation of PA degree
programs is under the CHED Technical Panel on Business and
Management with only a small Working Committee on Public
Administration composed of three or so members. As Reyes (1999) notes,
it is “a self-aware Public Administration,” unlike in the American case
where PA traces its roots to Political Science. The article emphasize that
the implication is that different institutions have latitude in designing their
curricula and setting the classifications for their faculty. Institutions,
however, are required to have their graduate programs evaluated and
approved by the CHED Technical Panel on Business and Management.
However, with these said the Philippine public administration has no
publicly available consolidated data at this time on the actual composition
of the faculty of the different colleges, universities, and institutions
offering degrees in PA in the country. Emphasizing the great concern
where there is risk of “inbreeding” and “stagnation” of ideas. Since
establishment in 1951, the IPA has valued close working relationship with
the civil service, and the institute has actively engaged in extension and
consultancy work with various government organizations at different
levels. The article highlights where Domingo-Tapales (2002) describes the
close relationship between the UP NCPAG and various government
agencies over five decades from 1951 to 2002. UP NCPAG generally offer
MPA as a regular program in the UP-Diliman Campus. The DAP is a
Philippine Government-Owned and Controlled Corporation (GOCC) and
works closely with various national government agencies through
customized MPM offerings. Discusses that UP NCPAG regularly offers short
training programs for newly elected national legislators and local chief
executives and legislators. DAP and ASoG also have a variety of short-
training or executive course offerings for public sector officials and staff,
and many other PA schools have similar offerings. DLSU’s Jesse M.
Robredo Institute of Governance does not offer PA degree programs but
offers certificate courses and executive training for public sector officers
and staff. Year after year, studies on local government policies, programs,
initiatives, and practices are some of the most common topics of
presentations by participants in the annual PSPA conferences. Many of the
200 colleges and universities offering PA programs in the Philippine have
some form of formal or informal engagement with LGUs in the form of
programs and projects and have LGU officials and staff enrolled in their
programs. Major government initiatives in the last decade, such as the
adoption of the Results-Based Performance Management System
(RPBMS), the Performance-Informed Budgeting (PIB) which later became
the Program Expenditure Classification (PREXC), and Public-Private
Partnerships (PPP), among others, appears to have been designed,
adopted, and implemented with minimal inputs from Philippine PA
scholarship. In charting the future of PA education in the Philippines, it is
perhaps best to revisit the still unresolved fundamental issues raised (De
Guzman in 1986). These are: "(1) getting faculty members who have both
the academic qualifications and administrative experience; (2) the
production and use of indigenous teaching materials; (3) the use of
innovative teaching methods and techniques, and (4) the formulation of
more relevant models and analytical concepts." (p. 381). The articles
includes highlights like in order to ensure that faculty members teaching
PA have the appropriate academic qualifications and experience, efforts
towards advancing PA education may require the establishment of a
separate CHED Technical Panel on Public Administration, a comprehensive
review of the current state of PA education and curricula, and the
development of the appropriate Policies, Standards, and Guidelines that
will cover not only undergraduate programs but also graduate programs in
the discipline. Despite the (re) emergence of other alternative Non-
Western PA paradigms, including Confucian PA and Islamic PA (e.g., see
Drechsler, 2015), few Philippine studies consider these lenses. "Imperative
to bridge the gap by reconciling both into the 'praxis' of public
administration. Theory without practice is living in an ivory tower; but
practice without theory is living without meaning and ideology." (p.81),
where Brillantes and Fernandez (2013) so eloquently raised. Brillantes and
Fernandez (2013) recently offered Gawad Kalinga as a model of Philippine
public administration and governance based. Emphasizing that in order to
develop indigenous theories, concepts, and teaching materials suited to
the local context, PA scholars across the country must have a strong
capacity to conduct high-quality research.

In conclusion, Public administration education in the country, as discussed

in the work of Torneo, has a rich history that dates back to 1955. The
country was the first in Asia to offer Public Administration (PA) degree
programs, with the establishment of the institute of Public administration
at the University of the Philippines. Since then, PA education has evolved
alongside the nations’ administrative, political and economic landscape.
Despite the growth in PA programs and professional associations, several
challenges persist. These include the regulatory issues, reliance on
imported theories and frameworks, and questions about the suitability of
PA curricula in meeting the needs of students and the public sector. In
addressing these challenges the author proposes several options. These
include managing indigenous scholarship, developing curricula that are
more suitable to the needs of students and the public sector. By doing so,
PA education in the country will continue to evolve.