The Importance of Ecology to Public Administration

Ecology refers to the study of the relationship of a system to its total environment. John Gaus popularized the
concept of ecology in the study of public administration in 1947. Since then, it has grown in acceptability as many
scholars recognized its importance to the understanding of public administration. Political ecology implies the
study of the relationship of a political system to its environment (Plano, Riggs and Robin, 1982:102). The ecology
of African public administration implies the study of the relationship of the African public service to its total
environment, which includes physical, cultural and social components. These are considered to have a great
significance for the performance of the public services in the continent.Emphasizing the impact of ecology on
national bureaucracies, Aluko has noted that: Bureaucracies are products of the specific settings from where they
originated. For instance, Weber’s bureaucracy is associated with the Protestant ethnic and the German tradition
and orientation. It is therefore interesting to note that bureaucracy has its socio-cultural dimensions…There are
certain ways in which the culture of a society determines the type of bureaucracy that emerges within the
society. This has been aptly demonstrated in Crozier’s (1964)study of the French bureaucracy…Crozier found
some uniqueness and some traits of cultural values traceable to the French people in the French bureaucracy… It
is clear that bureaucracy cannot be rigidly divorced or separated from the immediate socio-cultural environment.
Agagu (2001:75) has posited that “the relevance of ecology in the analysis of comparative public administration is
premised on the fact that bureaucracies and other political and administrative institutions are better understood
if the forces, conditions, influences and values that shape them can be known and dealt with. The notion of
ecology helps us to classify nations according to levels of development”. For Adebayo and Olufayo (2000:96), “a
critical assessment of any bureaucracy would reveal that the Weberian ideal type is hardly ever practiced to the
letter in any organization. It is being constantly influenced by other (human and environmental) factors”. In his
effort to understand public administration in developing countries, Riggs (1964) went into details studying the
environments in which such public services are located and function. For Robert Fried: An even more important
concept for Riggs was the ecology of administration. Here he joined the camp in the analysis ofgovernment
bureaucracy that stressed the importance of social forces in shaping bureaucratic behaviour and
conditioningperformance. Riggs was combating the technocratic camp that stressed the cultural (or supra-
cultural) imperatives o administrative organization and behaviour. (Fried, 1990). Indeed, it is from the
environment that the public administrator perceives the problems to be resolved, the alternative possibilities
within which choices can be made, the resources to be employed, and the support and opposition to policies and
programmes the clients to be served and regulated, the market forces which establishes the costs of the goods
and services provided by government, special interest groups that have a particular concern about what the
public and private institutions do, and which may offer support or opposition (Richardson and Baldwin, 1976:24).
As such, Olaoye (2002:201) argued, “both politics, which determines policy, and administration, which executes
policy exist in environments that have peculiar cultural, social, religious and legal under-pinnings that affect both
policy determination and its execution”.
Hague and Harrop, (1982:8) identified three popular approaches that are often adopted in the study of
comparative public administration, namely the institutional, the behavioural and the functional. The latter two
are considered as more appropriate for the study of public administration in developing countries, Africa
inclusive. The institutional (also traditional or historical) approach does not emphasize the human dynamics
involved in administration but concentrates on the study of structures.
Therefore, it is considered as better suited for the analysis of administration in developed societies that have
relatively stable institutions and systems.
For prismatic societies that are transiting on a continuum between tradition and modernity, and which exhibit
clustered social structures that do not allow for clear dichotomies amongst the social, political, legal, economic
and other institutions of society, the behavioural and functional approaches hold promises of offering better
explanations of the socio-economic and political forces and processes. This is because, quite often, such societies
run on hybrid structures and institutions that conform neither exactly to the traditional nor specifically to the
modern administrative formats. They are unique institutions whose functioning cannot be explained exclusively
either by the traditional or modern approaches. An example of this is what Hyden, (1985) calls the “economy of
affection” that captures the essence of the rationalized impacts of social structure on economic, social, political
andadministrative relations in prismatic societies of developing countries. Weber’s ideal bureaucracy can neither
comprehend norexplain the functioning of such systems in their totality. For the study of bureaucracy and
administration in transitional societies of Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America, Riggs rejected the ‘Sala’ model
and, instead, recommended what he called the “prismatic–Sala combination model”: … the inefficiency of the
Sala (model) (for the analysis of public administration in transitional societies) is reinforced by the price
indeterminacy of the bazaar–canteen, by pariah entrepreneurship and intrusive access to the elite, by the
agglomeration of values, by strategic spending and strategic learning as instruments of elite recruitment, by poly-
communalism and polynormativism, by double talk, blocked throughputs, bifocalism and equivocacy, by the
dependency syndrome, interference complex and formalism effect (Riggs, 1964:284).
As Olaoye (2002:202) has argued, attempting to wish-away the above realities would necessarily involve
responsibilities for ‘detribalization’, ‘deracialization’ and ’de-communalization’ of the various peoples and
societies. Rather, it is easier to identify the factors that shape the character of the Nigerian public service so that
one can analyze their effects on the system. To do this, it is important to identify the values and ideological
underpinnings that guide administration in developing countries, including
Africa. These constitute what Agagu (2001:78) describes as the “political and administrative features” of such
states, which includes the following: -
A widely shared ideology as the source of basic political goals, and a tendency for the political elements to
assume a major importance almost automatically;
- A high degree of reliance on the political sector for achieving results in the society;
- High level of political instability. Such is rare among the developed nations save for the few cases of France,
Germany and Italy (in the past);
- Concentration of political leadership among a very limited segment of the population coupled with great
“political gap” between the government and the governed; and
- The existence of an imbalance in the growth of political institutions vis-à-vis the administrative structure.
Furthermore, Agagu (2001:78) listed the peculiar administrative patterns among developing nations to include
the following:
One, public administration is imitative of the developed nations, rather than being indigenous. This means that
the administrative models are imported. Two, the bureaucracies lack adequately skilled and technically
competent personnel required for development purposes. It is a paradox that there is over-employment of
unskilled labour while in the aggregate, there is mass unemployment amongst the potential workforce. Three,
there is a tendency towards emphasizing orientations that are contrary to high productivity. Riggs (1964) had
noted that bureaucrats in developing countries exhibit preferences that are opposed to public principled
interests but rather, are based on personal interests. An indication of this is the high level of corruption in the
bureaucracies of developing countries. Furthermore, there is noticeable discrepancy between form and reality.
Riggs (1964) termed this “formalism” which Agagu (2001) exemplified with the making of good laws that may be
unenforceable under prevailing circumstances. Finally, Agagu (2001:78) noted that bureaucrats in developing
countries enjoy relatively high level of autonomy because only few groups are able to enforce close political
checks on them. It is with these in mind that we shall examine the ecology of African public administration with a
view to assessing how applicable the Weberian “ideal” bureaucracy is applicable to it.