Loading...
A shared purpose? Public administration education on the island of Ireland
Date
2026-03-31
Abstract
The environment in which public administrators work on the island of Ireland is increasingly confronted by demographic profiles, cross-cutting policy complexity, and so-called ‘perma-crisis’. We argue that the relevance of Public Administration (PA) education is more pertinent than ever for practitioners, and query how, and to what extent, the higher education settings of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (Ireland) have responded with convergent or divergent education and training offerings in higher education institutions and bodies. In Northern Ireland the durability of graduate PA education is reflected in a strong practitioner-academic nexus. In Ireland, PA education has largely developed in interdisciplinary programmes, often led from Political Science departments, and the Institute of Public Administration (Dublin), the main executive education provider to the civil and public service. Methodology: Using secondary sources, the article takes a diachronic approach to explore the development of public administration education in both jurisdictions. Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are informed by similar administrative traditions, but their experience is conditioned by different historical developments in public administration. Results: The evolution of Public Administration as an academic study and the delivery of education/ training programmes is systematically discussed in three distinct phases–origins, partition and separate jurisdictions, modernisation and professionalisation. Further, the article presents an overview of the major drivers, disciplinary features and curriculum design in programmes, North and South, and considers to what extent these programmes are convergent. Conclusion: We identify the primary challenges facing Public Administration and then suggest several initiatives that could be put in place to enhance the quality of education on the island of Ireland.
Supervisor
Description
Publisher
Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (INAP)
Citation
Gestión y Análisis de Políticas Públicas 40, pp. 72-86
Collections
Files
ULRR Identifiers
Funding code
Funding Information
Sustainable Development Goals
External Link
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International