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As two important offshoots of mainstream public administration literature, development administration and the new public administration appear to share a number of important characteristics. This is not to argue that these are but subsidiaries of one single movement, since there are some obvious differences of focus and orientation between the two; but simply to suggest that despite apparent differences, there are certain commonalities, which a careful examination reveals. The purpose of this article is to raise the possibility of a conceptual convergence between the two movements. Such a convergence, if achieved, might prove very promising to both areas of inquiry and represent not an insignificant contribution to the field of public administration. This article has attempted to highlight the emerging parallelism between development administration and the new public administration and argued that this is basically due to the similarity of mission in both cases. Both represent a self-evaluation of public administration in a time of transition, uncertainty, and turbulence.