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"The Public Administration Program has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding learning experiences I have gone through. The diversity of the perspectives the Program stresses is its chief merit-this approach accounts for the exciting and challenging learning process, and is essential for real world experience. At the same time, the intellectual and emotional investment of the staff accounts for the Program's highly supportive and flexible environment, especially favorable for international students like myself."

Mahabat Baimyrzaeva
Ph.D. student
University of Southern California

 

Public Administration > Projects

Faculty Projects in the Community

Consistent with the Program's mission, the faculty are involved in a number of projects that make use of their areas of expertise. In general these activities may be divided into two broad categories:

  • applied scholarship to make public organizations more aware of their public purposes, more effective in meeting those purposes, and more satisfying places to work;
  • applied scholarship that increases the capacity of communities to solve their own problems and better shape and utilize what public organizations have to offer.

What follows is a brief description of current, recent, and past projects that link the Public Administration Program to its communities. For more information on a specific project, please call the Program office at 956-8260.

Current Projects

Development Administration Program, Khon Kaen University, Thailand

In February Dick Pratt traveled to Thailand to continue his work with Khon Kaen University. He has been going there for several years, and is now the official external adviser for the development administration program. In addition to working with the development administration group he gave talks on Knowledge Management to university officials, critical thinking to Ph.D. candidates, and issues in local government to MPA candidates.

While there, he also made preliminary arrangements for a large group of local officials currently in a nationwide MPA program to visit Honolulu, and for a conference on decentralization and local government to be held in Honolulu in the fall of 2007.

Summer Leadership Institute

In 2004 the Hawai'i State Legislature passed a "Reinventing Education" bill that transferred many traditional functions of the Department of  Education to school principals, including fiscal decisionmaking, personnel and facilities management.  Specific mandates were given to principals such as assuming community leadership and involvement roles, improving student learning outcomes, and generally raising the climate of their schools. 

Both the Department of Education and school principals realized that already overburdened principals would face difficulty fulfilling these new roles and responsibilities without some help.  Later in that year, the Public Administration Program and the Hawaii Principals Academy began discussing a training program that would address strategies and practical tools for principals under Act 51 implementation that would begin July 2005.

PUBA faculty Jeffrey Ady, Dick Pratt and Chris Grandy were joined by Linda Kamiyama of the Hawaii Principals Academy in offering a three-day Summer Institute in June 2005.  They were joined by DOE experts Edwin Koyama [DOE Budget Director], Caroline Hasegawa, Solette Perry and Brian Mizuguchi of DOE Personnel, and Raynor Minami [DOE Facilities Director] in a highly interactive exchange of information, questions and answers, and structured experiences.

The Institute, held at St Stephens Diocesan Center, served 20 participants and focused on how principals and their schools could embrace change; clarify their school visions; understand and deal with their changing roles; manage statutory changes in their authority, power, and accountability; use budget management in decisionmaking; construct fiscal plans under Act 51; manage personnel; approach ethical dilemmas; and adapt their school visions to the requirements of Act 51.

Institutional Reform in Mongolia

Dick Pratt has been working in Mongolia on projects related to institutional reform. In 2002 he particiapted in a conference on Globalization and Development in Mongolia. In the following two years he worked with the School of Public Administration at the Academy of Management in Ulaanbataar as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. In the spring of 2005 he returned to begin a process of national higher education reform. This work was supported by the Fulbright Program beginning in the fall of 2005.

Tax Review Commission

Chris Grandy was confirmed by the state Senate as a member of the Tax Review Commission in the spring of 2005. The Commission was created in 1978 to review tax policy and make recommendations to elected officials on how they might be altered.

Organizational Learning Institute (OLI)

OLI has been created as a way to focus the resources of the Public Administration Program toward applied work that will improve the operations of our public organizations. Beginning in the summer of 2003 Charlene Young and Dick Pratt collaborated with Dwayne Yoshina, the Chief Elections Officer for the state of Hawaii, to design a series of workshops that would assist elections staff to better deal with the many challenges they face. The last of the workshops was held in February 2004. It is Mr. Yoshina’s hope that the work done here can be a prototype for training that might be given to elections programs in the Asia-Pacific region.

Survey on the Future of Government Service

David Nixon is working with a team of faculty at Princeton University and the University of Georgia on a survey of 7,500 federal executives across the federal government. It is the largest academic survey of federal executives ever conducted. The survey provides a unique opportunity to understand the backgrounds, views, and experiences of federal executives in a way that has not been possible in the past. It should advance academic knowledge about the public service and inform public discussions about the changing nature of government service and the best ways to recruit and retain the best and brightest to public service. The results from the survey will inform the work of the Task Force on the Changing Nature of Government Service, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

View the website here for more info.