Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. Working Group on Public Sector Quality Author(s) Juraj Nemec Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic Frantisek Ochrana, Marketa Sumpikova, Beata Merickova Title Public management profile: Slovakia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Public management (New Public Management) oriented reforms were introduced from late nineties in developed countries and a bit later also in CEE conditions. However, most attempts to use NPM tools in CEE are not systematic and not coordinated. Our research team deals already for more than 5 years with the issues of contracting, outsourcing on all levels of government, with theory and practice mainly in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two main streams are followed: a/ The main issue is systems of delivery of local services – we collected a lot of data on how the delivery is organized and what are the main problems. b/ The second issue is contracting out of supportive services in public organizations – also several data are collected. The results of our research clearly show that external delivery of public services and of supportive services is frequent solution – this means this NPM tool was introduced into Czech and Slovak environment. However, when investigating the process of contract award and contract outcomes, we can already prove (benchmarking was used to obtain data) that neither public-private-civil sector mix principles are followed, nor generally positive outcomes are achieved. In many cases there was no any analysis before the decision to contract; contracts are awarded in non-competitive way, and per capitam costs of service in some case increase compared to non-contracted solutions. There are more purposes of such situation, some of them we already highlighted in our previous conference (IASIA and IRSPM) papers. In this case we can again add something to our knowledge – thanks to support from Czech Grant Agency we were able to realize massive field research on delivery of local public services. Results of this research framed by theoretical and syntetical parts can be our contribution to the WG II activity. Except of this concrete case, we are able to frame the concrete NPM problem (delivery of public services) by comprehensive description of public management ideas based PA reforms in Czechia and Slovakia – their history and positive outcomes and impacts, but also problems and failures (this analysis, following the research protocol, could be effective starting part of our contribution (especially prof. Ochrana and prof. Nemec were regularly involved in PA reform processes in their countries).
