ECOLOGY OF

PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION

K.R.Pande
 Ecological Approach to Pub.
Admn.
• Ecology is identified as a cause-and-effect
relationships and is the means of seeing
things whole.
 Introduction
• Ecological approach to administration deals
with ecology or the environment of the
public administration that it survives.

• Administrative functions depend on

varieties of reasons for its successful goal
attending processes. Such as institutions,
nations, cultures, societies, and their
behaviors.
 Introduction

 No single principle or approach is able to

handle the administrative problems.

 Ecology is a term coined nearly a century

ago from two Greek words, and meaning
“the study of the home”.
 Meaning
• “Ecology” is a term borrowed from biology. It deals with
science concerned to interrelationship of organisms and
their environments.
• The ecology of public administration being the interaction
of administration and its environment, requires a deeper
understanding of the society and the various factors
affecting its functioning.
• Administration and its environment influence each other
and the understanding of the dynamics of this process is
necessary to understand the administration. This
approach is termed “ecological approach”.
 The ecology of public administration has
been emphasized by several scholars
such as John M. Gaus, Robert A. Dahal,
Roscoe Martin, and Fred W. Riggs.
 Particularly, it is detail described and
prescribed by Riggs. That is why the
credits goes to Riggs for building this
approach.
 Evolution
• ‘Ecology’ is a term coined borrowed from
two Greek words meaning “the study of
the home”. Some writers of public
administration have argued that one of the
central activities of the executive is
“housekeeping” the means need to create
a desirable environment in which
subordinates and employees can do their
best work.
• John M. Gaus was one of the first to
recognized the influence of ecology on
administration and place it at the center of
his philosophy of administration.
• His book, Regional Factors in National
Planning, in 1935, described the relation
between resources, public works, trade
areas, cultural affinities, natural regional
boundaries, and public administration
remedies that might be employed to deal
with them.
• Gaus published next book, Reflection on
Public Administration, in 1947, the first
chapter of which is called “The Ecology of
Government”. Then, he taught at Harvard
a course for resource, city, and public
administration planners, and the basis on
which these specialists were brought
together was ‘ecology’.
 Riggsian era
• In 1960s. Comparative Administration Group
based at Indiana University and studying
developing countries that had identified ecology
as an essential tool in the approach to
comparative administration.
• Since ecology deals with the relations between
living organisms and their environment, some
ecologists go so far as to suggest that certain
laws of survival are so endemic as to be
unalterable .
 Rigg’s Version
• Fred W. Riggs published his,The Ecology of
Development, in 1964, rejects the wholly deterministic
overtones of some earlier ecological theory, and he
further arguing that it should be developed as a
separate system.
• Riggs has tried to elaborate about ecology as a
system and he sees the connection between ecology
and national development as a ability of people who
will be able to understand their environment how to
behave in a new ways instead of reinforcing old
perception of the ecology.
 Riggs’ Approach
 Features and characteristics of structure and
function of ecological approach.