Roundtable: How do We Connect Public Administration and Human Rights?

Abstract

Global recognition that there are universal human rights and that governments have a duty to respect them, was one of the most important developments of the 20th century. In this century, though, human rights are challenged in many places. What role do scholars and practitioners in public administration play in protecting human rights? This question has not received adequate attention in the field. In this roundtable, nine scholars explore the different ways in which public administration scholarship and practice may contribute to the advancement of fundamental human rights. A general theme is the need within our field for more systematic attention to the subject of human rights. Contributors identify topics that deserve particular attention, such as the protection of democracy, the provision of services essential to personal security and development, and the empowerment of Indigenous peoples.

Three Frontiers, Three Barriers

Alasdair Roberts

What is the point of public administration? What larger good are we trying to accomplish, as scholars and practitioners in this field? We do not talk about these questions as much as we should. In the United States especially, the field of public administration has shifted its focus away from macro-level questions about the role of the state (Roberts 2019b). One result is that we lack a shared vocabulary—an inventory of concepts—that allows us to talk about these larger goals.

One way to remedy this problem is by improving our fluency in the language of human rights. This is a universal language, used around the world, that has evolved over the last 80 years (Freeman 2022). The language of human rights does not address every question relating to the role of the state. But it certainly allows us to have a better conversation about the role of the state in promoting a just society. We can even say that one of the distinctive features of the modern state—the sort of state that emerged after World War II—is its obligation to respect human rights. Obviously, some states fail egregiously to meet this obligation. But even the worst performing states feel the need to defend their conduct in the language of human rights.

In 2022, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance invited scholars to contribute papers that explore the connection between public administration and human rights—how public administrators can contribute to the advancement of human rights on one hand, and how ideas about human rights shape administration on the other. At the same time, the journal invited nine scholars from around the world to contribute short commentaries about the relationship between public administration and human rights. They are collected within this roundtable.

The commentaries that follow identify three frontiers for research on this topic. The first frontier relates to the question of basic services. What are the fundamental obligations of governments toward the people who live under their authority? In some countries in the Global South, this question is being answered by reference to theories of human rights. In India, for example, practitioners and scholars talk with increasing frequency about rights-based administration and rights-based development (Basu 2021). A range of important initiatives have been launched in India to give meaning to those concepts in fields such as employment, education, and food security. The same framework of rights-based administration could easily be applied by scholars to describe developments in the Global North. For example, the post-World War II project of building modern welfare states was essentially concerned with advancing rights-based administration, as is present-day work in the United States on inclusion and social justice.

The second frontier highlighted in these commentaries relates to the search for justice for Indigenous peoples. Scholars in public administration have not given enough attention to the historical role of public administration in supporting processes of colonization and subjugation of Indigenous peoples. This is beginning to change, but slowly. Research on historical practices, and on contemporary initiatives to render justice to Indigenous peoples, is largely absent from top-ranked journals in public administration and public policy. We can easily do better, by giving more attention to the important work on restorative justice and Indigenous self-governance that is being done in several countries today.

The third frontier explored in this roundtable might be the most familiar. It relates to the worldwide challenge to liberal democracy, which is one of the central pillars of human rights doctrine. The world has changed fundamentally from the late 1990s, when liberal democracy seemed to be making progress everywhere. In fact, we probably suffered from hubris in that era. The last 20 years have reminded us that liberal democracy cannot be taken for granted. If we want it, we must fight for it. This is as true for scholars in public administration as it is for anyone else. We are in one of those moments in history when it is imperative that we should stand up for human rights and find ways of integrating human rights into public administration discourse and practice. To do this, there are three barriers that must be overcome.

The first barrier is an unwillingness among many scholars to get involved in subjects that seem to involve difficult questions about politics and ethics. In graduate school, many of us learned how to demonstrate the hollowness of the politics-administration dichotomy. In scholarly practice, though, we often rely on it. We operate on the premise that if we structure our work the right way, we can sidestep fuzzy problems of morality and values and get on with the business of producing durable scientific truths. However, it is impossible in our field to make such a clean separation between science and morality. Moreover, the refusal to take a stand on questions of human rights, at a moment when those rights are in serious jeopardy, is an abdication of our responsibilities: as scholars, as human beings, and—for some of us—as privileged citizens of the Global North.

The second barrier that must be addressed is a tendency toward provincialism within American public administration. This unfortunate tendency has effects around the world because American scholars exercise disproportionate influence over major journals and associations in the field of public administration. Provincialism is not the same as exceptionalism, the usual charge against American scholarship. Exceptionalism is the belief that American history is qualitatively different from the history of other countries. Exceptionalism is necessarily comparative: to make the claim that the United States is exceptional, a person must have some conception of what other countries are like. Provincialism, by contrast, grows out of indifference to the experience of other countries. There is no effort to compare and contrast.

Provincialism in American public administration scholarship is sometimes evident in its approach to fundamental rights. American scholars of public administration do not usually talk about human rights. More often, they talk about rights using an American vernacular. Where scholars in other countries might invoke the vocabulary of human rights, American scholars are more likely to talk about American values, constitutional liberties, social equity, and social justice. An illustration of this practice is provided by the strategic plan released in 2023 by NASPAA, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration. NASPAA has ambitions to set standards for public affairs programs around the world. The strategic plan says: “Diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility are at the core of NASPAA’s identity” (NASPAA 2023). This is an example of American vernacular at work. NASPAA could have defined these critical core values using the more inclusive language of human rights. In fact, it would make sense to do this, given NASPAA’s aspiration to be a global standard-setter. However, there is no mention of human rights anywhere in its strategic plan or accreditation standards.

A third obstacle to bridge-building between human rights and public administration is a simple lack of knowledge about human rights among scholars of public administration, particularly in the Global North. In general, we operate with a layperson’s understanding of human rights. There are few if any courses on human rights and public administration, and there are no conference tracks on the subject. If we want to take human rights seriously, it will be necessary to improve our knowledge about how the concept of human rights has evolved over decades, and what it means today.

In December 2022, more than 30 academic bodies endorsed a statement to mark Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the day on which the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That statement said:

As scholars and practitioners working in the field of public administration, we mark this day by reaffirming our commitment to human rights and fundamental democratic freedoms. We believe in the inherent dignity of all people and that all people have equal, inalienable rights. These beliefs guide our research, teaching, and engagement in public affairs.

This is a first step toward the goal of infusing our work with a concern for human rights. The next steps are to improve our understanding of what concern for human rights entails and to identify the frontiers on which we can make the most useful contributions to fulfilling human rights in practice.

Human Rights as a Normative Basis for the Field of Public Administration

William Resh

In 1948, the United Nations (UN) enacted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which (rhetorically) committed its member states to ensuring their citizens’ basic rights to life; to freedom from torture, slavery, and inhumane treatment; to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; to freedom of expression and opinion; to a fair trial and due process of law, among others. Although no one is naïve enough to believe that simply signing onto this declaration would lead to members’ respective credible commitment to its goals, the UDHR represents arguably the clearest articulation of inalienable rights endowed to every human being.

To be recognized as a member of the UN requires a credible commitment to other members as defined by universally shared value bases. Each UN member is recognized as a state—the collective method of governance where a geographically coherent population is subject to a system of laws and regulations that are enforced by a centralized authority (Skowronek 1982; Weber 1946). In signing onto the UNDR, each member is recognized as a state by its authority for assuring the rights therein. A basic understanding of a state includes several components, but most pertinent to the function of public administration are (1) an evident rule of law that upholds consistent principles of governance and (2) a set of institutions responsible for reifying those principles into implementable law. Hence, public administration is the law in action (Resh 2019) and its credibility will be established, in part, by the extent to which the public sees their basic human rights protected in action (North 1993). Therefore, we should consider on what basis of human rights are assessments of “good governance” constituted in the social scientific field of public administration (Bertelli 2021).

Administration serves as the mechanism through which the government enforces laws and regulations that uphold basic human rights. Therefore, it is through administrative functions that the state’s authority for investigating and prosecuting violations of human rights, as well as providing support and assistance to victims of abuse or discrimination, is manifest. Ultimately, administrative effectiveness in protecting human rights depends on the political will of the government and the capacity of its institutions—including, importantly, its public administrative institutions–in ensuring accountability and transparency in protecting individual (human) rights through policy and its implementation.

At no time is the strength of a state’s institutions, and particularly its administrative capacity, more evident than in the advent of crisis. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, for instance, the government’s administrative response is crucial in ensuring the protection and fulfillment of human rights. For instance, the government must take steps to prevent further loss of life and injury, provide shelter, food, and medical care to affected individuals, and ensure that displaced people are not subject to discrimination or mistreatment.

On February 6, 2023, massive earthquakes wrought incredible devastation upon communities in southeastern Turkiye and Northern Syria, killing approximately 60,000 people in Turkiye alone at the last count of this writing. In the dead of winter, rescuers scrambled to save people from the freezing tombs of rubble under which they were buried. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a state of emergency across ten provinces affected by the earthquakes, vowing that—despite “shortcomings”—he would “not leave any citizen unattended” (Said-Moorhouse, Sariyuce, Saifi and Baysan 2023). Yet, reports quickly emerged that highlighted the various incompetencies and inefficiencies of state administrative services that resulted in inexcusable delays for rescue agencies to reach urban centers (Kayserilioglu 2023). Literally, citizens were “unattended” for days as they died unnecessarily under rubble.

The shortcomings Erdoğan alluded to did not emerge from some unforeseen set of events to beget this humanitarian disaster. Indeed, the magnitude of the earthquakes was not unprecedented in and of itself. This is a country that is constantly susceptible to sizable earthquakes by its geological locus. Rather, the shortcomings that created this disaster were created almost entirely by a kakistocracy the Erdoğan regime constructed over the years that preceded this earthquake—a turn to authoritarianism, as Naim Kapucu describes below, where a political executive consistently undermines a liberal democratic constitutional system to form one that overtly emphasizes personal loyalty to himself over professional competence in administration.

If Turkiye’s response involved prompt and effective emergency measures such as evacuation and rescue operations, providing aid and support to citizens, and setting up emergency shelters, it would have demonstrated adherence to UDHR principles. However, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to exactly the opposite. Instead, the world witnessed a lack of coordination and subsequent delay in providing essential support to affected people. This negligence multiplied the number of casualties. Moreover, if the capacity of the civil service is not quickly replenished, it puts these regions at risk of years of halting and half-measured attempts at rebuilding (Kayserilioglu 2023).

This outcome derives almost solely from the gradual gutting of state capacity in administration. Without regulatory enforcement integrity, developers easily skirted laws intended to prevent the deck-of-cards collapse that so many urban high-rises incurred in the region’s urban centers. With hollowed-out state emergency response agencies, there lacked any competence in coordination or due preparation for (again) an inevitability in this region. Active obstruction of perceived non-loyalist non-governmental organizations in support services was a practical requirement of administrators. Where third-sector support was accepted, the influence of the kakistocracy was so insidious as to corrupt institutions like Turkiye’s Red Crescent, who “sold thousands of tents to a charity instead of distributing them free” (Economist 2023).

Overall, the Turkish government’s response to the recent earthquake revealed its lack of commitment to upholding UDHR principles of protecting and promoting human dignity and well-being. One might seek to compare the responses between the Turkish state and their affected counterpart, Syria. But it is largely accepted that Syria is a pariah that has fundamentally abandoned any semblance of a credible state or a concern for the collective rights of the people in its geographic parameters. Turkiye (despite its illiberal direction) remains an ostensibly functioning democracy that is aligned with many democratic states in both security concerns (e.g., as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member) and formal commitments to human rights (e.g., as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights). Therefore, those ostensible commitments and its relative standing with the international community might presage some relative effectiveness in administration—effectiveness that would be evident in the face of a natural disaster. Instead, we see the very real consequences of diminished administrative capacity, where the loyal but incompetent are charged with matters that otherwise require professional expertise and capacity.

To conduct any social science as a unified field of inquiry, there is inevitably a value basis that must be accepted as a foundation for comparison and analysis (O'Donnell 1951). Transnational governance is effective only relative to the credibility of its members’ commitments to shared values (Breen and McMenamin 2013). Hence, the UDHR provides a viable basis for the extent to which a state upholds these values to meet the definition of credible commitment and the extent to which the capacity of its institutions affects that commitment.

Such a statement might be off-putting to positivist scholars who seek “objectivity” in social science. Yet, without such a normative foundation, how do we adequately assess “good governance” in the field of public administration (Bertelli 2021)? Nonetheless, public administration scholars from western democracies, most poignantly from the United States, have a long and spotted history in their embrace of a normative focus on fundamental human rights (Roberts 2019a). Turkish schools of public administration to this day “are still stuck to structural, organizational, and [narrow] legal perspectives” that eschew these normative concerns (Karkin & Gurses 2022, p. 366). In many ways, this is understandable given the widespread purge of thousands of liberal academics from Turkish centers of higher education by the Erdoğan regime through exile or even imprisonment. But what excuse do those of us in more robust “states” have?

As Alasdair Roberts contends above, the leading western and international academic associations tend to ignore the prickly human rights dilemmas that emerge from authoritarian regimes as a seeming matter of convenience, if not for profit. As Turkiye and other nation-states slip further away from the value basis of the UDHR, where are those associations’ voices? It is time to take human rights seriously and to recognize the centrality of public administration to a state’s integrity in the pursuit of those rights. It should not take tragedies of such a magnitude to make this point salient. The essays in this roundtable present a wide array of perspectives that contribute to that aspiration.

Human Rights, Democratic Governance, and the Diversity Dividend in India

Rumki Basu

The defining feature of Indian democracy is that it coexists with more diversity than is to be found anywhere in the globe. India’s diversity manifests in 22 constitutionally recognized languages, 2000 dialects, the world’s largest population of four religions (Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Parsi), and the world’s second largest population of Muslims. It cannot be overemphasized that to preserve and promote diversity in a democracy, citizen rights must be guaranteed in the constitution. The constitutionalized regime of fundamental rights for citizens, the limits of executive action as spelled out in public laws, and the role of the judiciary in the amplification of human rights, are the backdrop in which public governance should be discussed in India.

At the moment of India’s independence in 1947, the project of building a national civic identity, transcending the ascriptive (non-changeable) identities of caste, tribe, language, religion, and region, was recognized as the most important challenge facing the new nation. Secularism, the most difficult goal to practice by all sides of the political spectrum, becomes a value in the most diverse country on earth, which has more religions, languages, and ethnicities than anywhere else. Its formal constitutional declaration has generated a sense of reassurance and security for India’s multiple diversities and religious minorities.

We must be deeply introspective about the new ethic of the so-called New India today, where democracy is increasingly being understood in a majoritarian sense. An India where fear or mistrust, both of one’s neighbor as also of governmental and regulatory authorities, cannot be the India of the dreams of our constitution makers. An India that looks upon sections of its own citizens as if they live here as licensees and at the sufferance of others, subject to good behavior determined by fellow citizens, is the antithesis of the India of our constitution. An India that imposes uniformity upon diversity, not unity in diversity, as the answer to our ills cannot have a great future. The Indian ethos and its democratic traditions are too deep, too diverse, and too argumentative for India to be redefined or its identity to be rewritten.

A major factor in strengthening, preserving, and promoting human rights has been India’s exciting experiments in federal democracy. Just as fundamental rights represent the bulwark against both State transgression as also majority oppression, federalism provides a shared identity without which governance—legislative, executive, administrative, or fiscal—becomes monopolistic and unilateral. Federalism channels dissent or dissatisfaction into manageable outlets of constitutional structures, whether they are provincial legislatures, district-level autonomous councils, or models of local governance like Panchayati Raj. Commentators on the Indian scene have concluded that Indian federalism (albeit only quasi-federal) has quarantined conflicts within states or sub-state units and thus successfully prevented national conflagration.

At 76 years of age, India’s resilient democracy gives rise to a whole host of questions. Why is its increasingly more representative system not responsive enough to different sections of the population through its public service delivery system? What is the capacity of this democracy to create a sense of national identity without leading to majority versus minority conflicts? What is its capacity to manage social tensions arising out of the process of development? Even as these remain deeply troubling questions, a slide into an outright authoritarian system of governance is not high on the list of possibilities for India, according to even India’s worst critics.

Most transformations in the West go through a relatively peaceful and democratic process, whereas the same development in India generally suffers from sharp and wide dissent and at times even violations of basic human rights. Examples include the present debates on the removal of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir by the abrogation of Articles 35A and 370 of the constitution; the introduction of the idea of one nation—one election, and parliament’s approval of the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, all of which have wider ramifications for the constitution, society and human rights in India.

Our constitution has survived because of its ability to be amended and of the several multilayered narratives within, which leave a lot to the imagination of the courts to interpret and reinterpret. The Indian approach has influenced international thinking on the nature and feasibility of economic and social rights and on the necessity of considering different kinds of entitlements as part of an integrated regime of human rights. There is now a greater understanding of the impact of human rights on poverty and welfare as well as of the impossibility of the enjoyment of rights or human dignity amidst poverty. Indeed, the very concepts of “human development” and “rights-based development” owe a great deal to this jurisprudence.

New challenges have also emerged. In India in the last few decades, as we transit from the politics of scarcity to the politics of prosperity, we notice a major paradigm shift in the discourses on democracy and good governance. What stands out is the distinction made between a procedural notion of democracy debated by the constitutional legal functioning of its public institutions and a substantivist notion of democracy where the nation-building exercise has been redefined in terms of concrete citizen entitlements and actual access to rights and public goods. The biggest bane in India today is the phenomenon of “differentiated” citizen entitlements in different states of India; that is, you might get access to a decent platter of public goods like food, education, health, and employment, or you may not, depending on the quality of governance of the federal unit in which you are residing.

Over the years, we have built state capabilities. Today wherever mass violence persists beyond a day or so, the state is involved, whether by commission or omission. In recent years, there has been an insidious harvesting of a culture of hate, leading to active theatres of violence. Polarization is unrestrained, vilifying minorities. Hitler’s nationalism is different from Gandhi’s. Communalism is not only “the badge of a backward nation,” as Jawaharlal Nehru had famously once said, it also has a limited shelf life. History has taught us, time and again, that hatred and divisiveness, whether in politics or society, cannot survive for long.

However, I will emphasize that the Indian model of plurality should rest on an understanding that the strength and unity of the country is largely a product of this “diversity dividend” that it has reaped as a civilizational legacy. We should not forget that Gandhi delegitimized violence as an instrument of political power. What should worry every right-thinking Indian is the decline in norms of public discourse, where violence is no longer delegitimized as it should be in any civilized society.

How India might be transformed from a liberal to an illiberal democracy in the process of its transition from a soft state to a hard state, or through its journey from the politics of poverty to the new “politics of prosperity” are indeed matters of concern. As Rahul Sagar has observed, “India’s rise stems from civilizational choices made nearly two hundred years ago – to learn, to adapt, to unite” (Sagar, 2022). This is the only way she can move ahead and overcome the stupendous technological and human rights challenges of the twenty-first century.

Public Administration, Democracy, and Human Rights in African countries

Gedion Onyango

Since most of Africa’s developing states still wrestle with some extreme forms of human rights abuses, Democracy and Human Rights (DHR) discourses, in theory and practice, have mostly taken on high politics dimensions and remain subtle in how the civil service or public administration works and relates to citizens. The state-building political prioritizations in most countries have somewhat divorced public administration’s centrality and frustrated bureaucratic capacities to acquire and embed DHR values in state-society relations. As a result, African public administration scholars have yet to effectively link the ongoing DHR-sensitive public sector reforms (PSRs) with the public organizations’ institutional evolution towards entrenching democratic governance and human rights conditions in society. However, relatively peripheral works on DHR-related issues, like whistleblower protection, social diversity, and the like, are growing, producing interesting insights into African public administration and its affinities in entrenching human rights concerns. Also, African legal scholars and civil society groups have explicitly linked public institutions to human rights issues, such as gender inequality and violence against women and children. However, a bolder DHR research agenda in studying African public administration is yet to develop.

As one of the pathways toward unpacking how such a research agenda can be approached, this commentary explores how African public administration performs in entrenching its DHR value premises. It draws on Afrobarometer’s round nine datasets¹ to display citizens’ attitudes toward values like responsiveness, accountability, representation, fairness, and equality in Kenya and Uganda. These public value constructs are essential in discerning citizens’ perceptions of what the government should do and their influence on how it does these things.

In Africa, DHR-sensitive PSRs confront two significant challenges. First, they are hinged on the good governance agenda with its Western norms and structures. This mischaracterizes African governing values and results in a lack of social embeddedness of DHR reforms in public administration. Second, the mainstay of public administration systems is yet to effectively shift away from serving the political regime’s interests and toward enhancing citizens’ well-being. The subsequent state-society relation is skewed, making the State the rights holder more than citizens. Political elites’ interests take priority over the public interest. This is unlike in nation-states like Norway, where the citizens are rights holders (Hyden, 2021). With citizenship anchored on multiple political identities organized alongside communal divisions rather than a single national political identity, public administration is caught balancing between consolidating regime control and entrenching DHR values. Consequently, DHR values remain primarily symbolic, often pursued in a reactive fashion, thus doing little to build the bureaucratic capacity to acquire and promote human rights fundamentals.

However, since the 2000s, DHR-focused PSR has expanded in African public administration, establishing institutions like independent parliamentary commissions and an executive ombudsman. These are to improve the citizen-centeredness of public administration in African countries like Uganda and Kenya. It was thought that Human rights commissions and similar bodies would address DHR issues where the mainstream public administration failed. However, even these human rights specialized institutions are still wrestling with entrenching democratic and human rights issues in the public administration of most African countries like Uganda and Kenya. Still, how these are experienced varies from country to country, taking cues from the state’s own transformation or political development realities. Generally, the Afrobarometer survey shows that most Africans think that democratic administration and human rights conditions remain relatively poor, as described below.

Responsiveness and Accountability

As DHR values, responsiveness emphasizes service orientation that pursues receptive, speedy service delivery and positive feedback from the public. Accountability prioritizes transparency, impartiality, and citizen participation. Both should show the government’s servanthood to citizens. Findings show that more than half (67.2%) of respondents strongly perceive the government as a servant, 8.7% of Kenyans and 11% of Ugandans think the government should behave like the people’s boss. This may show that citizens support ongoing efforts to realize DHR reforms in Kenya and Uganda’s public administration. Approximately 79.3% prefer democratic governance over any other form of government. A total of 34.2% of Ugandans and 47.8% of Kenyans said their democracy has minor problems, with 30% saying both countries as democracies with major problems. Most importantly, public service systems are yet to enhance responsive and accountable delivery of healthcare, food, and clean piped water services for the citizenry.

Representation and Fairness

Respondents were asked, “How often, if ever, you felt you were treated fairly/unfairly by the government based on your economic status.” Less than half of Kenyans (24.8%) said they rarely experience unfair treatment in government institutions, with Ugandans at 23.9% and 24.3% in both countries. However, 35.8% of Kenyans and 37.1% of Ugandans said they often experience unfairness from the government. These findings may mean that bureaucratic representation deficits and administrative injustices threaten DHR value’s premises of Ugandan and Kenyan public administration.

Right to Access to Information

In a democracy, access to information is a human right. It allows citizens to influence public administration activities. In Kenya and Uganda, 49.7% stated that they are less likely to access information on public school budgets, although one-fifth said they were somewhat likely to access this information. On access to the local government development plan and budget, roughly half of Kenyans and Ugandans said they are less likely to access such information. In contrast, approximately 16% said they were somewhat likely to access that information. This may explain citizen oversight deficits, as confirmed by 46.4% of Kenyans and 52.1% of Ugandans who said they are not at all likely to report bureaucratic corruption.

Although these findings indicate some DHR deficits, they also indicate optimism concerning democratic administration in Africa. Since the 2000s, African Public administration has been transforming to realize DHR values due to the increasing demand for democratic governance. African governments now have gender equality, public service diversity, public participation, and decentralization policies to expand DHR values and structures. Still, there is a need for a more intentional DHR research agenda in African public administration. Overall, enduring tensions between African public administration and DHR reside in state fragility and governance conditions due to its politics of domination and consolidation.

Public administration for all peoples: accounting for First Nations’ knowledges and practices

Helen Sullivan

The dominant model of public administration (based on the experience of the United States and other anglophone countries) assumes a universalism that denies the centrality of local context and diminishes the role of Indigenous peoples. Consequently, public administration systems are ineffective in supporting the well-being of Indigenous peoples and lack legitimacy. Addressing these failings is a critical challenge.

In his election victory speech on May 21, 2022, Australia’s new prime minister, Anthony Albanese, committed to fulfilling the Uluru Statement From The Heart. This 2017 statement is the product of a sustained process of deliberation amongst Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The statement reads:

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country. We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution (Uluru Dialogue, 2021).

Encapsulated in this extract is the promise of a better future for all Australians, one that benefits from the constitutionally enshrined contribution of its First Peoples, who are members of the oldest continuing culture in global history. Also encapsulated are the devastating consequences of colonialism and post-colonial governance on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples—a denial of rights, of self-determination, and subjection to policies and practices that narrowed and diminished life-chances. Here the interconnectedness of public administration, democracy, and human rights is laid bare. This Australian story is also a global story and one that demands attention.

Public administration can never be fully effective nor legitimate if it operates within a system of governance that denies the human rights of First Peoples. Public policymaking and the behavior of public officials are guided by values and principles that determine who has rights. These rights—human rights—define who is considered a member of the public, what access they have to decision-making, and how they can be treated by public officials. Globally, colonization and the imposition of alien forms of governance and administration denied the First Nations peoples these rights, with devastating consequences.

The system of governance and administration that developed following the colonization of Australia by the British was alien in every sense to the continent’s First Nations peoples. It denied the existence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of Australian society, refusing to acknowledge them as citizens until 1967 and enacting untold harm on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through laws and public policies that restricted where and how they could live and work. Over generations, public policy in Australia brutalized and oppressed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, most shamefully in the practice of removing children from their families and communities—the “Stolen Generations” of the 1910s to 1970s—and most recently in the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention that introduced a raft of restrictions on the daily lives of residents in seventy-three remote communities and brought in members of the Australian Defence Forces to support its implementation. It is impossible to conceive a circumstance in which this would have occurred in non-Indigenous communities.

The consequences of these systemically discriminatory policies and practices are stark. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience poorer health, education, and employment outcomes than other communities and are more likely to be incarcerated and to die early. In 2005 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Professor Tom Calma AO, challenged Australian governments to commit to achieving equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in health and life expectancy within 25 years. “Closing the Gap” became the shorthand for policy and strategy work in support of this commitment. Despite significant government funding, progress on closing the gap has been painfully slow. Programs designed to help “close the gap” failed repeatedly. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples argued without much success for their direct involvement in the design and implementation of programs that affected them. The ongoing exclusion from policymaking and the lack of progress in “closing the gap” fueled support for the “self-determination” that is at the core of the Uluru Statement and the proposal for constitutional change.

Highlighting the capacity of public administration, democracy, and human rights to colonize spaces and cultures with no regard for the traditions and practices of “first peoples” is not new. However, it is a complaint that remains at the margins of mainstream public administration discourse because it challenges the idea that public administration principles and practices are universal and neutral. It proposes instead that they too are the product of a specific context (the United States and other anglophone countries) and reflect the values and norms and particularities of that context. The hegemonic success of this version of public administration, reflected in textbooks, academic journals, and guidance to developing countries, is unarguable, but the damage done to those subject to that hegemony is incalculable.

A public administration based on human rights for all is one that takes active account of First Nations’ knowledge and practices. Evidence suggests that doing so can help alleviate major, even existential, threats such as climate change, for example by paying attention to practices such as “cultural burning” of land, and more sustainable uses of water. It is a public administration that thinks about the idea of “Indigenous Diplomacy” as a means of foregrounding First Nation’s knowledge and cultural practices in its approach to foreign affairs and trade, something to which the new Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has committed.

Representation also matters. Presently Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are still too rare in the bureaucracy, particularly in senior roles. Important initiatives to address this include specific schemes designed to build leadership capability amongst mid-level bureaucrats such as the Australian Public Service’s Pat Turner Scholarship Program. These programs are effective but are small in number. Over time, it is hoped that more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will be encouraged and enabled to secure more senior roles. Developing a critical mass creates the possibility that the system of public administration itself can be changed as First Nations’ knowledges, practices, and values act on the prevailing norms, practices, and values of the system. This in turn demands that non-Indigenous bureaucrats also engage in learning to build their capability as public servants for all Australians. Political support and leadership are essential to secure the kind of system change needed. Adoption of the Uluru Statement is a step towards that system change. It provides for a reimagining of public policymaking and administration that acknowledges and takes proper account of the value of diverse knowledges to effecting and enhancing democracy.

From paternalism to authoritarian populism: shifting roles for Indigenous protection agencies

Alketa Peci

Policy and administrative reforms aiming to recognize, protect, and advance Indigenous rights are key milestones of advanced democratic societies. However, the growth of authoritarian populism in countries like Brazil is threatening to undo these reforms. Bolsonaro`s authoritarian populist government deteriorated a historically tenuous relationship between the Brazilian state and its governmental agency for Indigenous protection and Brazilian autochthonous populations. In this part of the roundtable discussion, we contend that public administration under authoritarian governments not only overlooks Indigenous rights but does not create conditions for their participation and active voice in policy-making. The historical trajectory of the Brazilian Indigenous Protection Agency (FUNAI- Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indigenas) under authoritarian and democratic governments illustrates the uneasy relation of public administration, human rights, and authoritarianism, and claims the important role of the democracy for a pluralistic policy-making process.

After the 16th century, colonization, enslavement, land expropriation, wars, diseases, assimilation, and other factors contributed to the decimation of much of the Brazilian Indigenous population. As in other Latin American countries, with independence in the 19th century, the attitude of several societal sectors toward Indigenous populations changed, partly recognizing historical mistreatment, and defending racial miscegenation as a distinctive landmark of the Brazilian society.

The tenuous relationship with Indigenous populations tends to be attributed to the Brazilian historical formation, overlooking the concrete role of public agencies and the forms in which they approach their constituencies under authoritarian regimes. The first federal Indigenous affairs agency, the Indian Protection Service (SPI), was created in 1910. The SPI focused on contact with and pacification of Indigenous groups and was initially headed by military personnel. The SPI was known for expanding the telegraph networks in unexplored areas of the country and adopting a non-aggressive approach toward Indigenous peoples. SPI had a few anthropologists as part of the agency and gradually recruited Indians for lower positions within the organization (Faria 2018; Pozzobon 1999).

The paternalistic policy adopted by SPI assumed that Indigenous groups would become progressively civilized and integrated into society. The state would be responsible for administering Indigenous lives, lands, and other resources until their progress to civilization (Veira and Quack 2016). This paternalistic vision was followed by ambivalence toward Indigenous land demarcation, which was considered an obstacle to national development, and faced resistance from local and regional elites interested in expanding their properties. The agency was terminated in 1963 due to corruption allegations, clientelist ties, and systematic abuses and violence perpetrated against Indigenous groups.

A new federal agency for Indigenous populations, FUNAI, was created by the military regime in 1967 but kept the paternalistic approach. Contradictions among FUNAI’s goals shaped its activities. Indigenous peoples were forcibly reallocated to new regions to accommodate huge development projects, with severe impacts on Indigenous well-being (Pozzobon 1999). After Indigenous peoples were moved inside reservations, FUNAI had the authority to govern Indigenous resources, and religious missionaries were the only groups who collaborated with the agency in “civilizing” them (Vieira and Quack 2016).

FUNAI kept the tradition of military leadership and inherited most of SPI’s organizational structure. Initially, the agency focused on dismantling corruption and clientelist local networks that marked SPI but also perpetuated the paternalistic approach toward Indigenous groups, as well as the reluctance to demarcate and register Indigenous lands and territories. Nonetheless, FUNAI also gradually incorporated the technocratic vision of public administration embodied by the military regime. Highly centralized decision-making processes and continuous training on Indigenous affairs for FUNAI technicians were translated into slightly improved land demarcation processes in comparison to the former SPI. However, prior to the 1990s, only 37% of all known Indigenous lands were demarcated and/or registered in Brazil (Lisansky 2004).

Summing up, paternalism toward Indigenous populations, militarization, technocratic, and centralized decision-making processes shaped the modus operandi of FUNAI, sidelining Indigenous populations as central actors in policy-making processes. Democratization shaped in an unprecedented way this approach toward Indigenous populations. By the 1980s, as the country transitioned out of military dictatorship to democracy, vocal social movements articulated political support and shaped the Constitution of 1988. New networks of activists representing transnational public anthropologists, Catholic missionaries who advocated liberation theology, and international journalists criticized the paternalistic approach and contributed to a pro-Indigenous movement. For the first time in Brazilian history, the rights of Indigenous peoples to their culture and identity, as well as their capacity to represent their own interests without the mediation of the state, were constitutionally recognized (Vieira and Quack 2016).

The democratic environment shaped important institutional changes within FUNAI. Since the 1990s, FUNAI delegated responsibility for health, education, and environmental services to ministries and non-governmental organizations enabling a more polyphormic governance model. Civilians, mostly anthropologists, replaced military personnel as presidents of the agency, although this leadership position still suffered from high turnover. Projects funded by the World Bank and other international organizations adopted a participatory approach toward Indigenous populations. The agency gradually supported a new “zero contact” policy for isolated Indian populations. In the early 1990s, the agency promoted an unprecedented land demarcation campaign. Although the policy became more democratized and respectful of Indigenous traditions, the impact of these policies on Indigenous welfare is yet to be understood (Faria 2018). Despite the lack of concrete impact measurements, democratization institutionalized Indigenous rights and enabled their voice and participation in policy-making, transforming paternalistic and authoritarian patterns of previous Indigenous policies.

However, the rise of Bolsonarism and its authoritarian populist approach challenged the democratic approach and restored the uneasy relationship of the agency with Indigenous populations. In June 2022, Dom Phillips (a British journalist) and Bruno Pereira (a former senior administrator at FUNAI, who resigned during the Bolsonaro administration to work closely with local Indigenous peoples) were murdered in the Javari Valley, Brazil, which is home to one of the largest concentrations of uncontacted Indigenous people in the world. This emblematic event exposed the approach of an authoritarian populist government toward the governmental agency for Indigenous protection, Brazilian Indigenous populations, and more broadly toward the environmental agenda, which is closely intertwined with Indigenous rights.

Bolsonarism is based on a diverse and unstable coalition that combines neoconservatism, agrobusiness interests, and a market-oriented economic approach with military policies that are marked by a corporatist and nationalist culture (Peci 2021). This coalition has resulted in an anti-environmental agenda that clashes with Indigenous land rights because Indigenous lands tend to be very rich in biodiversity.

During Bolsonaro’s rule, politically appointed positions within FUNAI were distributed among the militaries, agrobusiness ruralists, and Pentecostal neoconservatives, inducing additional frictions on FUNAI`s ambiguous mission. Although Bolsonaro defended the ruralist agenda in the region challenging demarcated areas, Indigenous rights activist Bruno Pereira was replaced by a missionary whose aim was to convert Indigenous groups to Christianity, ignoring the purpose of the “zero-contact” policy. FUNAI`s budget was reduced by half. FUNAI`s crisis exposed the inseparability of environmental and human rights agenda, but also the risks of authoritarian populism for democratic policy-making.

On January 1, 2022, on his first day as president replacing Bolsonaro, Lula da Silva signaled massive changes to Indigenous policy, by placing Indigenous activists as the leaders of FUNAI and of the new Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, rescuing their voice and participation in policy-making. It remains to be seen what will happen moving forward, since economic interests still hamper advancing the environmental agenda and Indigenous rights continue to be perceived as an obstacle toward huge developmental projects, particularly in the Amazon region.

This brief historical digestion emphasizes that the uneasy relationship of the agency for Indigenous protection with Brazilian Indigenous populations exemplifies the role of authoritarian visions of the State in hindering the rights and the voices of historically excluded social groups and serves as a reminder of the relevance of democracy as the fertile ground for amplifying these rights and pushing for more pluralistic policy-making. The historical invisibility of Indigenous rights and voice under authoritarian regimes reminds us how public administration, human rights and democracy are closely connected.

Building democratic resilience: A priority for public administration

Naim Kapucu

This roundtable on public administration, democracy, and human rights rightly demanded that scholars in the field address “big questions.” These big questions relate to the core responsibility of the practice and scholarship of public administration in promoting and protecting human rights and upholding principles of democracy. The roundtable also assumes the necessary mutual relationship between democracy and public administration for the realization of democratic ideals, as well as the effective governing of institutions.

This mutual relationship is very complex and cannot be addressed simply by focusing on technical aspects of public management. Democratic ideals depend upon the effective functioning of the state, deepest respect for human dignity and human rights, as well as effective service to citizens and engagement of citizens in decision-making processes facilitated by public administrators. From a resilience perspective, it is important that states and communities facing new challenges build the adaptive capacity to respond to and recover from potential threats to democracy, human rights, and public institutions.

In this commentary, I focus on the concept of democratic resilience and the role of public institutions and effective governance in promoting and supporting it. Democratic resilience gained substantial attention relatively recently among policymakers, practitioners, and scholars. The concept of resilience is widely used in many disciplines, including disaster studies and environmental planning and policy (Kapucu et al., 2013). The related concept of democratic resilience gained popularity after serious attacks on democratic institutions, attacks on fundamental human rights, and the rise of populism and authoritarianism—illustrated by developments since 2016 in Turkey, Hungary, and the United States (US).

Although not precisely defined, the concept of democratic resilience is still useful. Holloway and Manwaring (2022) systematically studied the term resilience from interdisciplinary perspectives and provided potential applicability to democratic systems. Democratic resilience is viewed as an outcome of macro-level elements of a system such as the independent judiciary, rule of law, effective public institutions, free press, and functioning civil society. Lieberman, Mettler, and Roberts (2022) edited a volume on democratic resilience with specific emphasis on rising polarization in the United States. They define democratic resilience as “a system’s capacity to withstand a major shock such as the onset of extreme polarization and to continue to perform the basic functions of democratic governance” (p. 7). Their definition of democratic resilience is systemic and broad for potential implications in other settings despite the reactionary tone based on what happened in the United States in 2020.

Many people have focused on the United States after the attack on US Capitol on January 6, 2020 as demonstration of democratic resilience at work, while Turkey provides an infamous example sharp return from a democratic system to human rights violations. It shows how an increasingly democratic system can return to authoritarianism using public institutions as instruments. The transformation from a democratic system to an authoritarian one was primarily based on the elimination of strong public institutions such as the core elements of the Ministry of Home Affairs (effective government operations through appointed professional provincial governors and district governors and well-established public safety apparatus through the Turkish National Police). Turkey has a tradition of strong public administration and some experience in democratic governance (Kapucu & Palabiyik, 2020). Turkey’s aspiration for European Union (EU) membership has influenced its progress in human rights and democratization as indicated in progressive legislative changes and constitutional amendments as part of the accession process.

Authoritarian tendencies started around 2011 and reached their highest level after the coup attempt in July 2016. President Erdoğan introduced emergency rule and seized more power to reverse democratization. Human rights violations by using public institutions and the judicial system in Turkey are well documented in an edited volume by Aydin and Langley (2021). The regime used governors and law enforcement chiefs who are appointed by Erdoğan to suppress fundamental human rights and dissent under the state of emergency rule. More than 200,000 thousand civil servants were purged from their positions, including over 6000 academics and thousands of high-level military and law enforcement professionals. These human rights violations were justified by decrees after the coup attempt, with the aim of consolidating power at presidential level without any judiciary or legislative oversight. Public institutions were used to destroy democratic ideals instead of building a democratic system.

Public trust in government is critical for the effective functioning of a democratic system which includes the public bureaucracy as well as political institutions. The tension between these two parts of a democratic system is unhealthy and damages the trust crucial for the effective functioning of government, public institutions, and economic and social systems. I believe the concept of democratic resilience, from a systems perspective, has the potential to advance our understanding of relationship between democracy, human rights, and public administration. It can also help us proactively invest in government capacity and build trust for a better functioning of a system.

A resilient system can absorb, adapt, transform, and recover from the impacts of shocks, and re-establish structures and functions in a timely manner. Resilience involves a continuous improvement process through democratic governance for better outcomes. Resilience thinking not only emphasizes investment in the capacity of institutions for continuous learning and adaptation; it also requires flexibility in building resilient systems. Public institutions can establish resilient systems that can function under threats. The restoration of the system requires effective coordination and collaborative engagement of core institutions. Public administration can play major roles in building democratic resilience engaging with diverse groups of stakeholders as part of democratic governance.

Building and enhancing democratic resilience require the engagement of stakeholders within a complex set of embedded relationships. Systematic theoretical and empirical research can address the role of public institutions in building democratic resilience. This can also help us address the big questions within the democratic systems. How can the resilience of democratic systems be enhanced through public institutions and engaging communities through democratic governance? How can government capacity and public leadership influence building and sustaining democratic resilience and protecting human dignity? Answering these questions can help further advance our understanding of how to build and sustain democratic resilience through effective governance and the role of public institutions.

The role of the public administration in the protection of human rights, civil liberties, and democracy

Rahel M. Schomaker

Given the centrality of the public administration for any kind of government, the question of whether the public administration itself must be “democratic,” and the implications if it is (or is not) for administrative structures, procedures, and personnel has been discussed for decades, with the debate gaining momentum (again) recently. Thus, what is the role of the public administration—is it a neutral instrument, or may it be a promotor and guardian, or even a gravedigger of democracy? Which consequences result from this for public administration research around the globe?

From a Weberian perspective, the civil service constitutes a neutral instrument in the hand of the political ruler—whoever this may be (Weber, 2002). Such a conception conceives “the bureaucracy as a simple receptacle of regime decisions, uninvolved in and unaffected by political forces—groups as well as ideas—clashing in the social arena” and assumes considerable “ease with which the civil service glides from one government to the next” (Carino, 2001, p. 1053). On the other hand, Waldo (1952) argues that the public administration as the core of modern government must be closely embedded in the democratic system and its principles, and public administration scholars from Western democracies exhibit a normative view on democracy and human rights (Roberts 2019).

Nonetheless, some consensus exists that “political features as the form of government, mode of governance, alliance of the ruling elites, and political culture have considerable impacts” on the public administration; administrative capacity in terms of effectiveness and appropriateness is “considerably affected by its historical, political, economic, and sociocultural contexts, which vary cross-nationally and cross-regionally” (Haque et al., 2021, p. 214 f.). Thus, the distinction between politics and administration going back to Wilson, interpreted “as a premise for treating public administration as a social technology which could be understood and utilized with-out regard for political setting” (Riggs 1965, p. 70) alone may neither be realistic nor exclusively guide public administration research.

Hence, understanding the role and patterns of public administration in and for diverse regime types is of pivotal importance for an academic scholarship that seeks to compare bureaucracies, as well as for public administrative practice. Several aspects must be considered at this point. First, democracy versus non-democracy may not be understood as a clear-cut dichotomy. Rather, many intermediate forms of regime exist between these two poles—competitive authoritarian states, liberalized autocracies, or states in transition just to name some. The administrative systems of such states may display some democratic features but do not fulfill all features of liberal democracies. Thus, “democracy” and “autocracy” can be understood as the extremes of a distribution, and “regime type” becomes a more fluid concept.

Second, contemporary public administration research—theoretical as well as empirical—that is published in leading journals is predominantly based on the experience of democracies, perhaps because the administrative systems of non-democracies or authoritarian regimes often suffer from opacity. Thus, much of modern public administration research is at least implicitly shaped by the national culture, socioeconomic factors, and regime type of Western democracies (Gulrajani & Moloney, 2012). Thus, whenever in comparative public administration countries from other contexts are the focus, frequently theories are applied that do not blend in with the respective framework conditions.

This, third, can be seen as a deficit that should be overcome, as many countries worldwide are either not yet democracies, or display hybrid features, or are backsliding on the basic principles of democracy. Nonetheless, the changing economic and political weight of these non-democratic states makes them relevant actors in the international sphere. It is globalization or trans-nationalization as a phenomenon that not only increasingly characterizes the academic community dealing with public administration topics, but also increases the necessity for bureaucrats from different regime types to cope with each other, being it bilaterally or multilaterally, and in the context of international organizations.

Several lessons can be drawn from this: First, implicit assumptions must be explicated. If we understand that public administration’s role is to serve as a guardian of democracy and human rights, and a neutral instrument, then explicitly accounting for this fact is necessary. Second, given the fact that it may not the ideal of public administration as a discipline to create a uniform model of bureaucracy that can be replicated in all countries worldwide, we must account for diversity. To allow for a more inclusive scholarship, implicit values or traditions must be taken into consideration when defining paradigms, concepts, and measures. Otherwise, they will be applicable in the “democratic context” only, but not to regimes that also display non-democratic features. This may be particularly relevant when referring to concepts such as participation, transparency, or representation that are closely intertwined with values and norms.

Our aim should be to broaden the knowledge base about the role of the public administration in the protection of human rights, civil liberties, or democracy more general. We should also adopt a research agenda that takes into consideration the diversity of regime types, reflecting the role of the public administration for these different regimes, enabling further research as well as the embedding of such topics in education and training for the public administrators of the future.

Recognizing porosity and contradictions in human rights, democracy, and public administration

Valentina Mele

One of the most urgent and frequent calls to public administration scholars is to dare ask big questions. It could be argued in fact that the division of labor among disciplines has led public administration to carve for itself a quite narrow academic mandate, that is, to look into and analyze dynamics and behaviors predominantly internal to bureaucracies, and to account for the socio-political landscape as a set of contextual conditions.

Over the last few years, scholars have recognized that this mandate may be unduly narrow (see for example Milward et al. 2016; Roberts 2013). To start, it does not allow addressing burning societal issues that, ironically, lie behind the very establishment of so many of the agencies that represent our unit or level of analysis. Additionally, it tends to offer a simplistic view of public bureaucracies as entities that persist unchanged across time and space. True, it is a significant intellectual endeavor to distill the essential attributes of organizations. However, we should also encourage theories and research that do not conceive bureaucracies merely as homogeneous institutions that interact with contextual conditions. Public bureaucracies and the socio-political landscape engage in a constant interplay. Pushing this argument further, bureaucracies and the socio-political landscape do not only influence each other but are also intermingled. In this respect, public administration bodies can be considered porous institutions.

The concept of porosity was made famous by Benjamin and Lacis roughly one century ago in an 1925 essay on Naples, where the authors associated the term with the weakening of hierarchies and boundaries both in the architectural and the social fabric of the city, such as in the public and private space. The intellectual reception of the term began immediately. Bloch generalized the term to “Italy and porosity”, and porosity started to be employed to describe the interchange between architecture and the people inhabiting, appropriating, and infiltrating it as a countermodel to functional modernism.

We do not know much about public administration bodies as porous settings, and exploring this further seems a promising avenue. One way to do so is to investigate how public administration and political institutions are mutually constitutive, but also to look at principles and practices that permeate and, as Benjamin would say, occupy the interstices of society. A recent effort in this direction is the work on “administered democracy” (Bertelli 2021). The discretion that modern governments grant to administrative actors captures not only the means and authority for implementing policies but also democratic values and the freedom to make trade-offs among them.

The scholarly call for an exploration of the mutual influence of government institutions, democracy, and human rights mirrors current developments in policy discourse and practice. A widely held view, in fact, acknowledges the interdependencies, and possible synergies among these three pillars for the development of our current societies. Notably, in 2015 the UN Human Rights Council established a “Forum on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law,” which provides a platform for promoting dialogue and cooperation on issues pertaining to these areas. In the same vein, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights frames the promotion of democratic governance as a key element in preventing the violation of human rights. The dominant view of global institutions and experts states that vicious circles are triggered when institutions are not accountable and elections are not genuine, and when public freedoms and the public sphere are restricted. In this scenario, the legitimacy and well-functioning of governments are compromised, and tensions among groups in society are exacerbated. Such a perspective has led to sustained efforts of several international organizations, from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), to mainstream human rights in their operations and efforts aimed at building administrative capacity in numerous country settings.

Although encouraging a focus on the interaction between public administration and the broader political and social values that surround government institutions, it is important to remember that democracy and human rights are not necessarily mutually reinforcing. The most obvious example of our current times is populism (Bauer and Becker 2020). In addition, when we move beyond national boundaries and look at the global level, the equation “if democracy, then human rights” must be handled with care (Evans 2001). Under conditions of globalization, the symbiotic assumption is problematic for two reasons. First, there may be a clash between the promotion of universal human rights that, by definition, span national boundaries and any claim of state sovereignty. Second, human rights governance ought to be orchestrated beyond the nation-state by global or transnational bodies that, so far, have exhibited an inherent democratic deficit.

In conclusion, we must do two things: acknowledge that governments are porous institutions, hence explore further the interplay among government agencies, democracy, and human rights; and do so without oversimplifying or lumping together the contextual conditions. In particular, we should remember that democracy and human rights are not necessarily symbiotic phenomena. These steps carry significant consequences for public administration. On the one hand, this awareness sensitizes our research to account for the instances where, for example, political leadership elected through representative democracy curbs the enactment of universal human rights, where civil servants find themselves torn between conflicting loyalties, where they embrace the conflict, or where they do not realize that such a conflict is unfolding. On the other hand, it calls for interventions not only from national and international bureaucracy but also from civil society organizations that, from their point of view, may be better equipped to spot misalignment between democracy and human rights.

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Footnotes