The recent administrative environment, characterized by rapid socio-economic changes and increasing complexity of policy issues, demands a new administrative paradigm differentiated from the past. Challenges such as polarization and conflicts in the international order, digital transformation and the dramatic advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, and demographic shifts are so complex that they cannot be effectively addressed through rigid bureaucratic administrative approaches of the past alone.
In line with these contemporary trends, the Korean government has consistently pursued proactive administration as a core administrative innovation strategy. Proactive administration refers to administrative actions where public servants handle their duties based on creativity and expertise for the public interest, including improving unreasonable regulations. This is a behavioral approach that encourages public servants not to settle for passive administration by being mired in rules and procedures, but to actively dedicate themselves to public convenience and the realization of public interest.
However, discussions on proactive administration have so far been largely confined to analyzing actual conditions and solving problems at the level of administrative practice or policy operation. While proactive administration has been emphasized in terms of changing public servant behavior and the active interpretation and application of systems, attempts to establish a theoretical framework to support it have been relatively limited. Although some empirical studies based on motivation theory exist, efforts to examine proactive administration in connection with global research trends in public administration academia have been somewhat lacking.
In this context, a new academic trend called Positive Public Administration, which has recently emerged particularly in European and Commonwealth countries in international public administration academia, reminds us of the developmental potential of proactive administration. A group of scholars including Patrick Lukas, who advocate for Positive Public Administration, criticize that administrative research has excessively focused on policy failures, bureaucratic pathologies, and administrative inefficiencies while overlooking success cases. They also emphasize that successful policy and institutional operation experiences should be at the core of learning. They argue that the existing failure-centered research contributed to diagnosing administrative problems but revealed limitations in restricting learning opportunities through successful administrative experiences.
In fact, the rise of Positive Public Administration has been influenced by positive psychology and positive organizational studies, which provide balanced insights by comprehensively analyzing strengths and success factors rather than being fixated only on organizational failures. Accordingly, Positive Public Administration seeks ways to improve administration for achieving social outcomes and actively poses questions about building government trust and legitimacy and methodologies for public servants to create public value.
As such, although proactive administration and Positive Public Administration have different backgrounds of emergence, they share common ground in emphasizing the ability to solve public problems. While proactive administration focuses on the active behavior of public servants for problem-solving, Positive Public Administration pays attention to successful administrative outcomes and public value creation derived from such behavior. In this regard, proactive administration can serve as a practical mechanism for Positive Public Administration, and Positive Public Administration can become a new theoretical analytical framework explaining the outcomes created by proactive administration.
Therefore, there is a need for the public service community and academia to pool their wisdom to establish proactive administration as a core mechanism of Positive Public Administration. If Korea's proactive administration is systematized more precisely within the theoretical framework of Positive Public Administration going forward, it is expected that proactive administration will contribute more significantly to administrative development both domestically and internationally.
