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The Working Group on Public Administration Reform in CEE and CA provides a forum for structured research and reflection on the dynamics of public administration reform in the NISPAcee target region countries. Specifically, the group focuses on patterns of reform in the EU New Member States (Central and Eastern Europe), the West Balkans, and in Central Asia. Public administration reform is defined as any restructuring of the administrative part of the public sector in order to solve organisational and/or societal problems associated with this structure and intended as promoting a professional, merit-based and neutral civil service.
For the Annual NISPAcee conference in 2019, the group focuses on the relationship between social science and policy making, which has been a recurrent topic in social science literature for some time.
Weiss (1979:426) introduced the concept of "research utilisation", and proposed one of the first classifications of the mechanisms that influence the use of research in the policy process. With the New Public Management paradigm for reform in the public sector, the focus on actively using evidence-based knowledge in policy and administration increased significantly. The core assumption is that the decision-making process improves through the use of the research evidence (Head, 2016). Pollitt (2006: 259-261) discussed different types of knowledge provided by academics to practitioners, and proposed a range of roles performed by academics in relation to administrative practice. According to Pollitt (2006), the tasks of the academics in their relationship to the world of policy and administration include using scientific methods to structure the problem that needs to be addressed, help with concept clarification, act as facilitator/moderator, help with decision structuring by using appropriate scientific methods, question false assumptions, provide methodological advice on how to collect data, and to put forward advice based upon limited generalisations.
A different direction of the research in this area focused on the transition from the traditional knowledge production systems where academics provide the answers to the problems posed by practice, towards investigating the communication between practitioners and academics, with the extension towards co-production, characterised by cooperation between the two worlds (Cepiku, 2011: 132, Gibbons et. al, 1994).
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