Amanah beyond borders: A theory of extrajurisdictional public stewardship

Abstract

Leadership theory assumes a leader holds authority over those led, and public administration assumes action within a governed jurisdiction. Neither assumption holds for the public official who works, from inside another country, to develop people the state does not employ, to conserve assets it inherited rather than built, and to shape cross-border flows it neither funds nor originates. This paper argues that a scattered family of leadership ideas, concerning welfare, service, custody and the leadership of flows, are facets of a single underlying phenomenon, and it names that phenomenon extrajurisdictional public stewardship: leadership exercised on behalf of a state or public, beyond its jurisdiction, over people, assets and flows that the state does not own or command, in order to create and sustain public value that the state cannot produce by directive. Drawing together stewardship theory, servant leadership, public service motivation, public value, diaspora diplomacy and Islamic leadership, in which the leader is a khalifah who holds what is not owned in trust (amanah), the paper defines the construct, specifies six dimensions, differentiates it from its neighbours, including leading without authority, boundary spanning, collaborative governance and transnational administration, and advances seven propositions with boundary conditions and a research agenda. Its distinctive claim is that public value made this way is produced by stewarding, without ownership or jurisdiction, a heterogeneous set of objects across conflicting cultural fields, and it proposes, rather than assumes, that such value weakens where the stewardship is visibly conditioned on short-term gain. The construct extends public leadership beyond the jurisdictional organisation, carries stewardship beyond the organisational and within-polity settings to which it has so far been extended, and argues that the trusteeship ethic of Islamic leadership offers a firm normative foundation for it.