Public administration in twenty-first century Bangladesh: fossilised, bureaucratised, politicised

Public administration has evolved aimlessly in Bangladesh during the past few decades. Earlier, the framework included a series of hierarchical organisations entrusted with tasks and responsibilities, loosely coordinated by a conventional executive agency. Despite a series of reforms, no qualitative change has been perceptible. The public administration network kept expanding with more agencies established on an ad-hoc basis and a large body of personnel hired to run them. Key issues relating to structural matters, centralisation, bureaucratic domination, politicisation, ethics, and probity have affected bureaucratic performance and productivity. There have been attempts to incorporate the concepts and practices of the more recent approaches to public management, but they failed to yield positive results due to implementation snags. Future reforms should focus on reconfiguring public administration around an expanded governance-based framework incorporating all post-NPM paradigms and adapting them to the country's unique conditions and reflective of current needs and priorities.