Abstract

It has long been recognized that one of the keys to the successful completion of many public administration initiatives in democratic societies is the judicious management of citizen engagement; a difficult task to achieve under the best of circumstances, even when not impacted by increasingly complex diversity issues. It is equally clear that one of the most significant considerations in contemporary public administration education, at both the theoretical and operational levels, is the need to identify and implement methods to ameliorate, if not eliminate, the potential impediments to cooperation that accrue to the growing diversity at virtually all levels of social structure worldwide. It is the purpose of this paper to call to the consciousness of both the practitioners of public administration, as well as those educators who are charged with providing them with the most effective techniques for implementing their initiatives, a social science simulation, Bafa Bafa (Shirts, 2010)that has a proven track record as an effective technique for defining and dealing with diversity issues.