Wolfgang Drechsler (born June 6, 1963, Marburg, Germany) is a Public Administration, Political Philosophy and Innovation Policy scholar. He is Professor of Public Administration and Government at the University of Tartu, Estonia (since 1993), and additionally Professor of Technology Governance and Public Management at the Tallinn University of Technology (since 2004).

Drechsler holds degrees from Bridgewater College, the University of Virginia, the University of Marburg, and the German Post-Graduate School of Public Administration Speyer. Before coming to Estonia, he taught at Universities of Marburg, Giessen, and Frankfurt am Main, all Germany, and as Visiting Professor in Lund, Sweden. He has served as Advisor to the President of Estonia, as Executive Secretary with the German Wissenschaftsrat during German reunification, and, as an APSA Congressional Fellow, a Senior Legislative Analyst in the United States Congress. He is the Vice Chairman of the executive board of Praxis, Estonia’s pre-eminent public policy think-tank, and a former member of the Innovation Policy Council of the Estonian Ministry of Economics.

Philosophically, Drechsler is a classical Hermeneutician, as one of the last students of the late Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Public Administration, Drechsler emphasizes the non-technocratic, non-managerial, "state sciences" approach that focuses on effectiveness rather than efficiency. In economics and public policy, he is a strong protagonist of the role of the state in economic growth and of innovation and industrial policy.

Drechsler received the 1997 Estonian National Science Award, Social Science category, the 2001 Alena Brunovskà Award for Teaching Excellence in Public Administration, the 2002 Oustanding Alumnus Award from Bridgewater College, where he also delivered the annual W. Harold Row Endowed Lecture, and in 2004, the Maarjamaa Rist, Estonia's Order of Merit.

Publications

• Enhancing the Capacities to Govern: Challenges Facing the CEE Countries (2004, co-ed.)
• Good and Bad Government (2001; on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Siena frescoes)
• Die selbstverwaltete Gemeinde (1999, ed.)
• Paradiama (Otto Kaiser 75), Trames (1999, ed.)
• On the Eminence of the Social Sciences at the University of Dorpat (University of Tartu) (1998, also in Estonian)
• Foundations of Public Administration (1997, ed., in Estonian)
• Johann Ulrich v. Cramer’s Opuscula (5 vols., 1996, ed.)
• Estonia in Transition, World Affairs (1995, ed.)
• Reforming Higher Education and Research in Eastern Germany, World Affairs (1992, ed.)
• Andrew D. White in Germany (1989)