Advancing Ethics-led Administrative Discretion in Public Administration: A South African Perspective

Abstract

The chapter explores how South African Batho Pele ethics-led frame of discretion can enable future public administrators in an administrative state to better understand administrative discretion and effectively manage it. It is based on secondary data from the available literature against the South African post-1994 efforts to tame its inherited ethically barren apartheid administrative discretion in the practice of public administration towards building a capable, ethical, and developmental state. The findings show that the ethically barren apartheid administrative discretion posed a challenge to the new ethically attuned democratic South Africa’s practice of public administration. They further highlight that indeed the lack of ethics consciousness in discretion in the practice of public administration presents a challenge for public administrators in an administrative state. The challenge is how could public administrators use their discretion ethically in the practice of public administration? For public administrators in an administrative state, the tension between moving in a spirited way in decision-making and remaining sensible is a real problem of how to exercise one’s discretion in the practice of public administration in an ethically conscious way.