Administrative Theory & Praxis

Critical Public Administration and the Environment

Governing the environment has become an increasingly urgent challenge in public administration. Yet, despite the critical role of public administration in implementing environmental policies, the field of public administration has been slow to fully embrace environmental governance and administration as a key area of study. Compared to other administrative areas such as healthcare, criminal justice, housing, and education, environmental administration remains underexamined (Samanta & McGraw, 2024). While studies on environmental governance —focusing on actors, networks, and social-ecological governance systems—have been published in key public administration journals, they often overlook environmental administration as a key area investigation. Similarly, the role of public administrators in shaping environmental policies —through administrative processes, knowledge production, engaging in policy development, implementation, evaluation, and citizen engagement —has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. 

At the same time, scholars within critical public administration have challenged the traditional views of bureaucracy and governance and called for greater citizen participation, re-examining power structures and challenging status quo, developing administrative critical consciousness, incorporating cultural competence by integrating diverse perspectives, and re-distributing knowledge and influence in policy making between administrators and citizens (Blessett et al., 2016; Blessett & Gaynor, 2021; Erwin & Stephenson, 2019; Feit, 2024; Trochmann et al., 2022; Riccucci et al., 2024; Samanta & Hand, 2022). In an environmental context for example, Viswanath & Samanta (2022) critically reflect on the United State Department of Agriculture, one of the biggest federal agencies in the United States enacting and implementing environmental and climate policies using the theoretical frames of feminist phenomenology and feminist standpoint theory, crafting a feminist model for appraising the agri-environmental bureaucracy in the United States. 

Across disciplines, research has firmly established that pre-existing systemic inequities and discrimination influence access to public services and programs. This especially holds true in the case of environmental policies and programs. As such, the critical public administration scholarship lends itself well to the examination of environmental policies and programs. Critical perspectives in public administration can shape environmental administration by offering theories and practices that focus on balancing stakeholder interests in policy formulation and implementation, designing and adopting collaborative and participatory governance approaches in environmental decision-making, addressing inequities in environmental decision-making processes, and challenging hegemonic environmental decision-making concepts.

Much of the current push towards decolonization of public administration scholarship is rooted in broader notions of equity and justice in public administration (Didier, 2025; Oldfield, 2010), but also a critique of traditional New Public Management and Neo-Weberian State (Dunn & Miller, 2007). Moreover, discourses that have centered efficiency and effectiveness in public administration have slowly returned towards praxis as a form of advancement of scholarship and practice (Box, 1995; Zanetti, 1997; Zanetti & Carr, 1997). Feminist critical approaches to public administration can also help shed light into the environmental challenges facing contemporary public managers (Eagan, 2014).

Much of the public administration work that engages environmental issues occurs at the implementation level (Sevä & Jagers, 2013). This focus on the work of street-level bureaucrats and their interactions with citizens, both for enforcement purposes (Pacheco-Vega, 2020) as well as for knowledge-sharing ones (Blijleven, 2023), makes this a fruitful area of scholarship for critical public administration. Critical efforts have examined the role of street-level bureaucrats on environmental performance (Putkowska-Smoter & Niedziałkowski, 2021), the challenges that discretionary power poses for gatekeeping (Putkowska-Smoter, Smoter, & Niedziałkowski, 2024), and the degrees of citizen satisfaction (Nie and Wang, 2023). However, a key area that remains underexplored is the role of citizen participation in the design and implementation of environmental policies. Though there is much work in the policy sciences literature, there is much less to discuss from a critical perspective in the public administration realm (Ventriss & Kuentzel, 2005; Smith, 2010; Zhan, Wing-Hung Lo, & Tang, 2014). Certainly, there’s room for additional work that can critically examine sectoral policy outcomes and environmental policy – street-level-bureaucracies’ integration (Steinbacher, 2024).

ATP has long shaped the field of public administration theory, pushing conversations in new conceptual and theoretical realms and “pushing the boundaries of theory and praxis in public service” (Nickels & Heckler, 2024). For example, it is one of the first North American public administration scholarly forums to focus on decolonization of public administration, and more recently, also served as a platform for holding voices that critique decolonization in public administration led by American public administration scholars (Imas, 2005; Alkadry, 2002; Nisar, 2023). Thus, ATP is a fitting venue to elevate and organize critical perspectives in public administration to the study of the environment and have these critical perspectives be in communication with each other. We invite contributions that represent varied socio-economic, political, geographical and cultural contexts, especially from the Global South.

This special call focuses on how critical public administration engages with and how its principles are applicable to the environmental realm. We welcome contributions organized around (but not limited to) the following questions:

• How are government programs influenced by public administrators in different environmental governance contexts?
• How do we use intersectional frameworks to address systemic inequalities and institutional biases in the environmental realm?
• How are traditional bureaucratic models (e.g., Weberian bureaucratic model) being reassessed in the Global South in the context of environmental administration and natural resource governance?
• How do we use counternarratives and critical perspectives to re-appraise traditional views of governance and bureaucracy and advocate for more inclusive approaches Examples of theories include: social and environmental justice, feminist theories, poststructuralism, decolonial and postcolonial theories, and theories of political ecology. 
• What are the theories emerging from the Global South or non-Western bureaucracies that challenge the normative assumptions of “bureaucracy” and offer alternative perspectives on environmental governance, institutional behavior, and administrative resilience and adaptability?
• What can we learn from case studies and applications from the Global South? For example, how do street-level bureaucrats use voluntary approaches for protection of lakes in Mexico.
• How are public administrators actively centering equity and justice in environmental work?
• What types of critical and decolonial approaches are scholars using in the research of environmental governance?
• How do the interactions between street-level bureaucrats and citizens influence decision-making behaviors in the environmental arena?

We welcome empirical papers that apply critical public administration theories and frameworks as well as theoretical manuscripts that engage with, extend and expand these theories and apply them to the environmental field.