Michiel de Vries, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Email: m.devries@fm.ru.nl
Veronica Junjan, University of Twente, School of Management and Governance, Enschede, Netherlands
Email: V.Junjan@utwente.nl

NISPAcee Project Manager:

This panel intends to bring together the experiences of practitioners in public administration reform (consultants, local, national and foreign advisors) and the research carried out by scholars in public administration on the topic of public administrative reform and how to make it work.

Often, there exist serious obstacles limiting the achievement of the reform objectives of public administration (PAR). This is also the case in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the member states of the CIS.

This panel seeks contributions which address this issue, focusing on CEE/CIS countries. Papers are most welcome with examples of best (or good or bad) practices of administrative reform under adversity. We also welcome theoretical and empirical-analytical papers on this subject; for instance, explaining why reform attempts work under certain circumstances, but not under others.

In 2007, a pilot of this panel was organized during the NISPAcee Conference in Kiev. This panel was a well attended, interesting and stimulating one, in which this several aspects of the subject were extensively discussed.
Some of the problems that were identified:

• lack of a common understanding and expectations of the aims of PAR projects;
• confusion over the terminology used and methodologies proposed;
• suspicions about the professionalism of foreign consultants;
• suspicions about the willingness of recipient governments and beneficiaries to implement projects as external donors expect and need them to be;
• uncertainty about who the real beneficiaries of technical cooperation are;
• uncertainty about the objectives of PAR and standards of ‘best practice’ or ‘benchmarking’;
• uncertainty about the problems of managing projects and making them sustainable under difficult circumstances;