Content area
Full text
Introduction
When the coronavirus started spreading across the world from Wuhan, China, the WHO declared it a global pandemic. As the virus reached almost all countries in the world, governments scrambled to put together a pandemic management system with varied effectiveness. This development brought public leadership concerning pandemic management into the limelight. In the public leadership literature, there is a growing consensus that public leadership is multi-dimensional. While Hartley (2018, p. 203) argues that “Public leadership may come from state, market and/or civil society,” ‘t Hart and Tummers (2019, p. 11) find three types of public leadership, namely “political, administrative and civic.” Following Mau (2020), this article mainly focuses on administrative leadership, which is particularly important for developing countries (Ohemeng and Huque, 2017).
The role of administrative or bureaucratic leaders has been debated for a long time. Price (1961, p. 752) lamented that although the main job of career civil servants should be “to look ahead at the great problems that confront the nation,” they are narrowly focused on the interests of their bureaus due to prevailing “traditional prejudices.” With the expansion of bureaucracies in the 1960 and 1970s due to the assumption of the welfare state approach by governments, antagonistic attitudes toward public bureaucracies increased manifold resulting in the thinning of bureaucracies and the deinstitutionalization of leadership (Terry, 2015) during the 1980 and 1990s. Renewed focus on administrative leadership emphasizes a set of characteristics, such as proactive (Barrington, 1984), collaborative (Ohemeng and Huque, 2017), networked (Liddle, 2010), collective (Brookes and Grint, 2010), transformational (Wright and Pandey, 2010) and conservator (Terry, 2015) among others.
In a developing country context, administrative leaders can address “wicked problems” having “complex and dynamic challenges” with a “collaborative approach” to bring together all segments of society to “identify solutions'” (Ohemeng and Huque, 2017, p. 214). The management of the COVID-19 pandemic may be considered a wicked problem. In this context, this article aims to examine the role played by administrative leaders both at the national and local levels in Bangladesh. Particular attention will be paid to the interface between the health sector and administrative leaders and the prevailing balance of power between the two. The role played by frontline public servants and their superiors are also examined. Also, an attempt...