Making People Matter: Moving Toward a Humanity-Based Public Administration

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how a humanity-driven approach to Public Administration (PA) can be used to resolve macro-level value conflicts. I define a humanity-driven approach to PA as one that prioritizes human emotion, lived-experience, perceptions, and acceptance at all stages of governing. I then present three value conflicts in PA, and apply a humanity-driven approach to reclassify conflicts into value hierarchies that provide a roadmap for conducting future research and theory development. The work builds on existing research prioritizing social equity, lived experience, and the resident-state interaction in the application of the administrative state.