The Evolution of Comparative Public Administration: Post-CAG Developments

When the Comparative Administration Group (CAG) wound down in the early 1970s, many feared it would take the entire comparative public administration movement down with it. After all, CAG had been the beating heart of the discipline for over a decade, pulling together some of the brightest minds in the field and funnelling Ford Foundation dollars into ambitious cross-cultural research. But endings in academia often turn out to be beginnings in disguise. What followed CAG was not decline, but reinvention – a phase marked by a new institutional home, a sharpening of old theories, and the steady, almost stubborn, intellectual presence of Fred W. Riggs.

From CAG to SICA: A new home for comparative studies 🔗

The dissolution of CAG could have left a vacuum. Instead, it triggered a reorganisation. In 1973, the Comparative Administration Group was formally reconstituted as the Section on International and Comparative Administration (SICA), becoming the very first section of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). This was more than a name change. It signalled a shift in how scholars wanted to approach the subject – less as a standalone research group chasing grant-funded projects, and more as a permanent, member-driven forum embedded within a major professional association.

SICA inherited CAG’s mission but updated its framing. The focus broadened from purely comparative administration to include international and development dimensions, reflecting the changing realities of a world growing more interconnected. According to Fred W. Riggs, a founding member of both CAG and SICA, public administration itself had to become comparative and global in its new paradigm, because the problems it addressed increasingly crossed national borders.

Why the transition mattered 🔗

Three things made SICA’s emergence significant. First, it preserved institutional memory. The networks, reading lists, and theoretical commitments that CAG had built did not evaporate – they were carried forward by scholars who simply moved into a new room. Second, it placed comparative work permanently within ASPA, which meant guaranteed conference slots, newsletter space, and access to a large membership. Third, it refocused energy away from the Ford Foundation’s large-scale project funding (which had dried up) toward smaller, member-driven initiatives that were more sustainable in the long run.

Fred Riggs as the bridge between eras 🔗

No figure is more central to this transition than Fred W. Riggs. Having chaired CAG for a full decade from 1960 to 1970, Riggs was already regarded as the field’s most influential theorist. His 1964 book Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society had become, in Ferrel Heady’s assessment, the single most notable contribution to comparative public administration. When SICA took shape, Riggs did not step back into retirement – he kept writing, revising, and mentoring.

His continued involvement gave the post-CAG phase a remarkable intellectual continuity. Many academic movements lose their way when their founding generation fades. Comparative public administration did not, largely because Riggs kept refining the prismatic society model he had made famous, and because he used his stature to mentor newer scholars rather than to defend old positions.

The ecological commitment 🔗

Riggs had long argued that administration cannot be understood apart from the society it operates in. This ecological emphasis – that administrative behaviour is shaped by economic, social, political, and cultural surroundings – remained the backbone of post-CAG work. Scholars who wrote for SICA publications rarely abandoned this premise; they tested it, refined it, and occasionally challenged it, but the idea that an administrative system is a creature of its environment kept its hold.

Prismatic society revisited: Riggs refining his own work 🔗

One of the defining intellectual contributions of the post-CAG phase came from Riggs himself. In 1973 – the very year SICA was formed – he published Prismatic Society Revisited, a thoughtful re-examination of the model that had defined his career.

The original prismatic model pictured a society as light passing through a prism. A fused society, undifferentiated and traditional, was like white light before refraction. A diffracted society, modern and specialised, was like the full spectrum after refraction. In between sat the prismatic society, caught mid-prism, where traditional and modern elements coexisted uncomfortably. Most developing countries, Riggs argued, fit this prismatic description.

In Prismatic Society Revisited, Riggs addressed critics who felt the model was too static or too pessimistic. He introduced a bi-dimensional framework involving differentiation and integration, arguing that a prismatic society developing toward a diffracted stage needed both. He also introduced new categories – such as “neoprismatic” and “orthoprismatic” – to capture variations within the prismatic stage. This was not a cosmetic update. It represented a genuine effort to account for the messiness of real-world transitions, where societies do not move cleanly from tradition to modernity along a single axis.

Applied prismatics 🔗

Alongside the theoretical revisions, Riggs moved toward application. His work on applied prismatics tried to make the model useful to people actually working in development – administrators, reformers, policymakers in transitional settings. The question shifted from “what is a prismatic society?” to “what should a reformer do when operating within one?”

This pragmatic turn mattered for several reasons. It answered a long-standing critique that the prismatic model described problems without suggesting solutions. It also connected comparative public administration to the rising field of development management, ensuring the two did not drift apart. Scholars studying reform failures in places like post-colonial South Asia or Latin America found applied prismatics helpful because it explained why textbook reforms, copied from Western bureaucracies, often failed when transplanted into contexts marked by heterogeneity, formalism, and overlapping.

SICA’s contributions: Workshops, publications, and awards 🔗

SICA did not survive on Riggs’ reputation alone. It created platforms that kept the field alive and visible. Three kinds of activity stand out.

Workshops and symposia 🔗

SICA organised regular workshops and panel discussions at ASPA’s annual conferences. The most prominent of these is the Fred Riggs Symposium, an annual two-day event that brings together scholars from around the world to discuss a key issue facing public administration. These gatherings are not just ceremonial – they function as working spaces where doctoral students, mid-career researchers, and established figures exchange ideas across national contexts.

SICA also hosts the Ferrel Heady Roundtable, named after another giant of comparative administration, which invites eminent scholars to reflect on their careers and research. For younger researchers, events like these offer the kind of intellectual community that is otherwise hard to find in a subfield spread across dozens of countries.

Publications 🔗

After the closure of the Journal of Comparative Administration in 1974, SICA worked to fill the publication gap. Today it supports the International Public Management Journal and publishes an Occasional Paper Series, a peer-reviewed forum designed to let academics and practitioners reflect on pressing issues in comparative and international public administration. Special issues have focused on topics ranging from public administration in Latin America to global food insecurity, signalling the section’s continuing engagement with real-world challenges.

Awards and recognition 🔗

Perhaps the most visible legacy is the Fred Riggs Award, given to individuals who have made substantial contributions to the conceptual, theoretical, or operational development of international, comparative, or development administration. Past winners include Francis Fukuyama, Geert Bouckaert, Ali Farazmand, and Pan Suk Kim – a list that reads like a who’s who of the field. SICA also offers the David Gould Scholarship to support graduate student participation at ASPA conferences, ensuring that the next generation stays connected.

Influence on subsequent research 🔗

The post-CAG era quietly shaped entire research agendas. Scholars working on bureaucracy in transitional economies, on public sector reform in developing states, and on institutional analysis in plural societies continue to draw on Riggs’ conceptual vocabulary – heterogeneity, formalism, overlapping, polynormativism. These are not just historical curiosities. A 2019 study cited in Fred Riggs’ Wikipedia entry found that Riggs was the most frequently mentioned scholar in examination questions set by India’s Union Public Service Commission over the preceding two decades.

More recent work has taken the model to new contexts. Rumki Basu’s 2021 article in the Indian Journal of Public Administration revisits the prismatic model to examine contemporary South Asia, arguing that Riggs’ framework remains surprisingly relevant to understanding administrative challenges in the region. Even critics who find the original model dated often end up reworking it rather than discarding it – a sign of its lasting analytical grip.

Decolonising comparative public administration 🔗

A recent strand of post-CAG scholarship, documented in a 50th anniversary reflection on SICA, highlights the section’s contribution to decolonising comparative public administration – moving beyond Western-centric frameworks, bridging academic-practitioner divides, and addressing global challenges collaboratively. This is an agenda Riggs himself would have appreciated, since he consistently argued against treating American public administration as the universal standard.

Why this phase still matters today 🔗

The post-CAG phase teaches something valuable about intellectual fields: they survive not through institutional inertia, but through continuous renewal. When CAG dissolved, the movement could have quietly faded. Instead, SICA kept it alive by adapting – different funding model, different organisational form, broader mission. Riggs kept it intellectually vital by refusing to treat his own theories as finished products.

For students of public administration, understanding this phase clarifies why certain questions still dominate comparative research today. Why do Western-style bureaucracies struggle in developing countries? Why do formal rules and informal practices diverge so sharply in transitional settings? Why does “best practice” so often fail when lifted from one context and dropped into another? Riggs asked these questions half a century ago, and every successive wave of scholars – whether working on New Public Management, good governance, or public policy reform – has had to reckon with his answers.

What do you think? Does Riggs’ prismatic model still capture the administrative realities of modern transitional societies, or has globalisation created new patterns that demand an entirely different framework? And can a single theorist’s influence genuinely sustain a field across generations, or does every discipline eventually need to outgrow its founders?

References

1. https://www.sicaaspa.org/
2. https://patimes.org/celebrating-50-years-of-international-and-comparative-public-administration/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_W._Riggs
4. https://inep.org/images/2025/1973-Riggs_Prismatic_Society_Revisited.pdf
5. http://www.sica-aspa.org/fred-riggs-symposium/
6. http://www.sica-aspa.org/call-for-papers/
7. https://www.sicaaspa.org/sica-awards
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00195561211005632
9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pad.70030