SICA’s Role in Advancing Comparative Public Administration

When scholars and practitioners started asking how governments around the world could learn from each other after World War II, a quiet institutional revolution began inside the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). That revolution eventually took the form of the Section on International and Comparative Administration, better known as SICA. For anyone studying comparative public administration, understanding SICA is less about memorising an acronym and more about tracing how an entire sub-field matured into a global conversation on governance.

The origins of SICA: from CAG to a permanent section 🔗

SICA did not appear out of thin air. Its story begins with the Comparative Administration Group (CAG), which was set up in 1960 as a committee of ASPA and funded generously by the Ford Foundation. CAG attracted a remarkable cluster of thinkers – Fred W. Riggs, Ferrel Heady, Dwight Waldo, John Montgomery, Ralph Braibanti and others – who wanted to move public administration beyond its heavily American frame of reference.

By the early 1970s, CAG had lost its Ford Foundation funding and was struggling to sustain itself as an independent committee. Rather than allow comparative work to drift away from ASPA, members chose to institutionalise it. In 1973, ASPA created its very first section, initially called the Comparative Administration Group and soon reorganised as the Section on International and Comparative Administration. This restructuring was led by Fred W. Riggs, who served as its founding chairperson and is widely regarded as the father of comparative public administration.

The significance of this transition is often underappreciated in Indian textbooks. CAG had been a project-based committee dependent on external grants. SICA, by contrast, was embedded inside ASPA as a permanent membership section, which gave comparative public administration an institutional home that could outlive funding cycles and individual scholars.

Why 1973 mattered for the discipline 🔗

The timing is important. The post-war decades had produced an explosion of newly independent states across Asia and Africa, a wave of development administration literature, and growing scepticism about whether Western administrative models could simply be transplanted elsewhere. A dedicated section gave scholars a stable platform to keep asking difficult questions about ecology, culture and context in public administration – the very themes Riggs had embedded in his prismatic-sala model.

What SICA actually does 🔗

SICA describes itself as a forum that brings together ASPA members committed to introducing an international and comparative perspective into public administration practice and academic endeavors. Its day-to-day work can be grouped into four broad activities.

Scholarly publishing 🔗

The flagship publication is the International Public Management Journal (IPMJ). IPMJ is jointly sponsored by the International Public Management Network and SICA, and SICA members receive the journal with their annual dues. The journal follows a rigorous double-anonymised peer-review process and has been edited by leading figures in the field, from founding editor Fred Thompson of Willamette University to Steven Kelman at Harvard’s Kennedy School and, more recently, Gregg G. Van Ryzin at Rutgers University-Newark.

Beyond IPMJ, SICA also runs an Occasional Paper Series that offers a peer-reviewed forum for academicians, practitioners, students, instructors and researchers to reflect on pressing issues. Special issues have examined subjects as varied as public administration in Latin America (published in both English and Spanish) and global food insecurity. A periodic newsletter, which won ASPA’s Patricia Yearwood Chapter/Section Newsletter Award in 2017 and 2020, keeps the community connected between journal issues.

Conferences and intellectual forums 🔗

SICA anchors two flagship events at the annual ASPA conference. The Fred Riggs Symposium is a two-day gathering where scholars from around the world debate a key challenge facing the discipline – recent themes have included global challenges to governance in the 21st century. The Ferrel Heady Roundtable, named after another towering figure in comparative administration, brings scholars together for a focused conversation on a pressing issue; a recent edition examined the role of NGOs in promoting democracy.

Awards and recognition 🔗

SICA administers the Fred W. Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration. Established in 1985, the award recognises scholars whose sustained contributions have shaped the theoretical and applied dimensions of the field. The prize is named after the discipline’s most influential twentieth-century voice and itself becomes a kind of living history of comparative public administration.

Supporting students and early-career scholars 🔗

Since 2009, SICA’s Gould Scholarship Program has provided stipends to help students attend ASPA conferences, and the section raises funds to defray registration and membership fees for international students and early-career faculty from under-represented regions. For a global field, this is not a trivial detail – it actively works against the risk that comparative public administration becomes a conversation dominated by scholars from wealthy countries.

SICA’s intellectual contribution to comparative public administration 🔗

At the level of ideas, SICA has done three things that matter for any serious student of the discipline.

Institutionalising a global perspective 🔗

SICA’s aims explicitly commit it to integrating international and comparative knowledge into public administration training in all sectors of government and to responding to global economic interdependence by expanding professional and scientific exchanges worldwide. This is not just rhetoric. By making the comparative lens a standing feature of ASPA rather than a one-off project, SICA helped shift the centre of gravity of American public administration away from a purely domestic focus.

Anniversaries that doubled as intellectual stocktaking 🔗

SICA has used its anniversaries to push the field forward rather than merely celebrate itself. In 1997-98, to mark its Silver Anniversary, Public Administration Review published a symposium of three articles in its January/February 1998 issue that looked retrospectively and prospectively at international and comparative administration as a sub-field, followed by a fourth article on the future of development management in 1999. For the thirtieth anniversary, Donald Klingner and Jennifer Brinkerhoff co-edited a special IPMJ issue on emerging perspectives on development management.

The fiftieth anniversary, marked in recent years, has been even more ambitious. A SICA history project involving interviews with former chairs and award recipients has produced scholarship examining how the section contributed to decolonising comparative public administration, bridging academic-practitioner divides and addressing complex global challenges.

Refocusing on global public problems 🔗

Contemporary SICA documents are strikingly honest about the limitations of earlier generations of comparative work. The section now frames its mission around issues such as chronic hunger, poverty, climate change, human rights and immigration, arguing that the public issues being faced today are increasingly global in nature and that comparative and development perspectives help policymakers design solutions that are feasible, sustainable and cooperative. A recent commentary in Public Administration and Development argues that comparative research, particularly in non-Western contexts, has never been more important for meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Why SICA matters for Indian students of public administration 🔗

For students preparing for civil services, university examinations, or research in public administration, SICA is not a peripheral name to memorise – it is the thread that ties together several unit headings in the syllabus.

First, SICA is the institutional successor to CAG, and most textbook accounts of comparative public administration’s evolution end abruptly in 1973 without explaining what replaced CAG. The answer is SICA, and its continued existence is a significant piece of evidence that comparative public administration did not, as some critics feared, decline after CAG’s dissolution.

Second, Indian scholarship has engaged actively with the intellectual agenda SICA has nurtured. Work in the Indian Journal of Public Administration has revisited Fred Riggs’s models in the context of prismatic societies today, and IGNOU course materials explicitly situate SICA as the continuing promoter of study, teaching and research in comparative administration. Students who cite only CAG are telling half the story.

SICA as a model of scholarly community-building 🔗

There is also a practical lesson for anyone thinking about how disciplines sustain themselves. SICA combines a peer-reviewed journal, a working paper series, annual symposia, awards, student funding and a newsletter into a single ecosystem. Each element reinforces the others – a conference panel becomes a special issue; a student stipend produces a future board member; an anniversary triggers a history project that feeds new research.

Current challenges and future directions 🔗

The recent anniversary literature does not shy away from hard questions. Scholars now openly discuss how comparative public administration can move beyond Western frames, how to integrate lessons from fragile and failing states, and how to bridge the gap between academic research and practitioner needs. Drawing on concepts like ‘topos’ and ‘chronos’, recent commentaries argue for learning across different administrative systems and considering possible futures rather than treating Western experience as the default reference point.

For SICA, this means continuing to broaden who counts as a voice in comparative public administration, sustaining a journal ecosystem that captures both rigorous theory and practitioner wisdom, and ensuring that the next fifty years engage seriously with the governance problems of an interconnected, climate-stressed world.

What do you think? If comparative public administration is to remain genuinely global, should more institutional leadership shift to sections and associations rooted in the Global South, or is a platform like SICA – anchored in ASPA but actively international – still the most practical bridge between administrative traditions? And what would an Indian equivalent of the Fred Riggs Symposium, focused on South Asian governance challenges, actually look like?

References

1. https://patimes.org/celebrating-50-years-of-international-and-comparative-public-administration/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_W._Riggs
3. https://www.aspanet.org/ASPA/ASPA/Chapters-Sections/Section-Information-Pages/SICA.aspx
4. https://www.aspanet.org/ASPA/ASPA/Chapters-Sections/Section-Journals.aspx
5. http://www.sica-aspa.org/call-for-papers/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riggs_Award_for_Lifetime_Achievement_in_International_and_Comparative_Public_Administration
7. http://www.sica-aspa.org/
8. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sica-aspa-58288471/
9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pad.70030
10. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pad.2094
11. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/78051/3/Unit-1.pdf