School of Public Policy's Roberts Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Alasdair Roberts, director and professor at the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy, has been recognized with what is considered the most prestigious award in the field of comparative public administration, the Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration.

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The Riggs Award, granted by the American Society for Public Administration’s (ASPA) Section on International and Comparative Administration (SICA), recognizes scholars who have made “significant and widely recognized contributions to the conceptual, theoretical and/or operational progress in the fields of international, comparative and/or development administration.” It was created in 1985 in honor of SICA founder Fred W. Riggs. 

Roberts has been named the recipient of the 2022 Riggs Award in recognition of his many contributions to the field of international public administration and policy.

In its announcement of the award, SICA said, “Over his decades of scholarship, Professor Roberts has worked diligently to present his academic work in a way that is relevant and applicable to practitioners.

“As one nominator wrote, ‘[H]is works deal with issues of government openness, security, administrative reform, and the influence of public institutions. In my view, he performs the role of public intellectual in a way that few public administration scholars are able to, writing and speaking on topics that have broad appeal and reflect contemporary concerns about government. …He is an extraordinary talent that offers a model worthy of the contribution of Fred Riggs, seeing the possibilities for a robust comparative approach to big questions of the state that Riggs would recognize and celebrate.’”

Roberts writes extensively on problems of governance, law, and public policy. His most recent book, “Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century,” received the 2021 Book Award from the American Society for Public Administration's Section on Public Administration Research. He has written seven other books, including “Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age,” recipient of the Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration. 

Roberts was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2007. He is the former co-editor of the journal Governance and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals in the field of public administration.
“I'm deeply honored to receive this award from my colleagues and friends in SICA,” Roberts said. “At this moment in history, it's especially important to find ways of building scholarly connections across borders. SICA should be congratulated for pursuing that goal for almost a half-century.”

Roberts will receive the award on March 19 at ASPA’s annual conference, in Jacksonville, Florida.  This year’s conference theme is “Democracy under Threat: The Future of Equality in a Post-COVID World.”