Teaching Public Budgeting and Finance as Complex Adaptive System

Complexity studies were nonexistent until the work of Poincare during the period between 1881 and 1886. Poincare‟s work illustrated the first indication of chaotic behavior in a dynamic system. Today, complexity studies extend to vast areas in the fields of natural and social sciences. These studies uncover information of complex nature through paradigms such as interconnectedness, network, process, self-organization, mutual causality, bifurcation, scattered matrix, emergence, collapse dynamics, and phase shift. In public policy and budgeting, complexity studies are also making their way to observe various complex phenomena, providing information that the traditional Newtonian sciences are not capable of providing. Yet, teaching public budgeting through complexity models still is not widely accepted in most institutions of higher education despite the in-depth and vast information that these models uncover. This is because most institutions of higher learning still are constrained by top-down hierarchal systems that promote control and linear observations. Studying public budgeting falls under such limitation, preventing students from appreciating the complex nature of the discipline. This article addresses the problems and limitations of the current linear methods in teaching public budgeting in most institutions of higher learning. It then offers a complexity model in teaching public budgeting and the benefits gained through the application of such model in studying the subject.