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Manual On Good Administration Principles

The concept of good administration has been recognised only recently as a right
as well as an administrative and legal audit standard. However, it can be stated
that the intellectual and historical foundations of the good administration are
as old as the emergence of the concepts of power and administration. A report
prepared by the Venice Commission states that the “good administration was
expressed by Aristotle as the following: “Moral responsibility was viewed as
originating with the moral agent as decision-maker.”

In history, some principles and rules of good administration are found in the
times of Sumerians, Ancient Egypt, Persian Empires, Ancient China and India,
Greek and Roman civilizations, even civilizations of Aztec, Inca and Maya.
Therefore, the basis of many of the principles and rules discussed in the context
of good administration dates to pre-modern state era. In particular, a regime
in conformity with such principles as lawfulness, equality, impartiality and
honesty was demanded by those who were ruled by the public administration
and voiced by the political philosophers.

Discussing the relations between the administrator and the public in separate
works is an ancient tradition in Turkish-Islamic States. These books, booklets
or political letters, which include the characteristics that a ruler must have
and the code of conduct and ethical rules that a ruler must conform to as well
as basic principles of government, are referred to as “siyasetname” (political
treatise) and “nasihatname” (advice letters). Siyasetname and nasihatname aim
at guiding the rulers and directing them to conduct actions for the benefit of
the society. Most of the advices in these letters correspond to contemporary
principles of good administration.

The need for adoption of and conformity with the principles of good
administration and the implementation thereof by the public servants in
addition to the administrators led many ruling philosophers, who acknowledged
the importance of this issue and took office in bureaucratic missions, to laying
down guiding principles and rules in detail for the public servants in the
literary genre titled “Edeb’ül Kâtib” (Code of Conduct for Public Servants). It is
understood from the historical sources that some contents in the texts, which
were prepared for both administrators and public servants, were entitled with
the legally binding nature by command of Heads of the State so that these
contents applied to public servants.

The manual named “Bürokratlara Mektup” (Letters to Bureaucrats), authored,
in the 8th century, by Abdulhamid El Katib, who served as a senior public
administrator, as well, can be seen as the first extant independent literary work
as “Edeb’ül Kâtib” in the field of good administration to date.

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