Minnowbrook Conference

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Using funds supplied as part of a "super-professorship" paid for by New York state, Dwight Waldo facilitated a 1968 meeting at Minnowbrook, Syracuse University's conference center in the Adirondack Mountains. Limiting participation to people under age 35, Waldo was principally interested in redefining the focuses of public administration theory in the context of social upheaval--a timely topic in 1968.

Minnowbrook marked the beginning of the "New Public Administration". The need for administration that was relevant to the public good was the general theme of conference papers, but no one idea dominated the proceedings which can be found in the compilation Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective, published in 1971.

"New Public Administration" was markedly different from the existing perception of public administration. It put more emphasis on the normative approach.The scholars who attended the Minnowbrook Conference were young scholars of public administration and they were more than eager to embrace new definitions of their discipline.They were severely harsh at the value neutral aspect of public administrationand marked out four goals and three anti goals of the "New Public Administration" .

The four goals were 1.relevance 2.value 3.equity 4.change. The three anti goals are: 1.They rejected the value-neutral concept of public administration; 2.They rejected that public administration is concerned about preserving status-quo. 3. Public administration is not a branch of politics or management. In order to achieve the goals the authors put forth four solutions which are famously called as the 4 D's. they are debureucratization,democratization,delegation anddecentralization. But the problem is that they do not provide a concrete idea about the degree of debureucratization or democratization or delegation or decentralization required in the New Public Administration.

Later, a second conference, called "Minnowbrook II" was held at the same facility. That conference was not as successful as establishing itself as a defining intellectual event in the field of public administration as the first.