Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 19th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview PA Reform Author(s) Nikoloz Shekiladze Georgian Institute of Public Affairs Tbilisi Georgia Title Delegation of power – step towards public engagement or public administration reform mistake?! File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Participative management has, at times, been promoted as a panacea for poor morale and low productivity. But for it to work, the number of conditions has to be met: the issues in which employees get involved must fall under their interests; a constructive contribution requires relevant competence and knowledge, and a trust and confidence between all the parties involved. Such style of a management is quite a useful instrument on one hand and the ideal model for generalization on the other. As if we replace the actors involved in the employer-employee model by the state as main decision maker and private sector or civil society as parties concerned the content of a decision making process and management approach will be the same. Participative Public Management has both supply and demand sides. The supply side of the equation is made up of a state institutions and local government bodies while on the demand side we can see various types of for- or not-for-profit organizations and interest groups. If participation is to be effective, then the supply side must be receptive to and capable of accommodating external involvement aimed at affecting decision and service delivery. The state, being on a supply side, should be proactive, in order to foster participation process by creating supportive environment for the second and the third sectors to get involved. On the other hand, the demand side, by itself, should be more capable and equipped with capacity to adequately respond to incentives for participation. This paper weighs Participative Public Management (PPM) from the perspective of two main trends in Public Administration Reform, such as New Public Management (NPM), and the Neo-Weberian State, considers its pros and cons, and delivers critical assessment of comprehensive participative management, shaped in public-private and not-for-profit partnerships, actively utilized in NPM dimension from the view of Neo-Weberian Concept. The theoretical discussion is based on Georgia cases. In other words, Georgia examples of public-privet and not-for-profit partnerships lead us to a case study research design employed in this paper.. Qualitative by its nature, the research explores the question: to what extent is the delegation of power from Public Sector to Private and Civic institutions, as the most complete from of public engagement, applicable to transitional courtiers with malfunctioned democracy, using Georgia case. The paper concludes that in Georgian reality, state of equilibrium between supply and demand sides in a participation process does not provide sufficient conditions for successful involvement of private and civil sectors into the Public Administration. Thus, a delegation of power, through absolute privatization of or contracted out public functions may lead to incorrigible results.
