Includes countries in Central, East European, Caucasus, Central Asian Countries in Transition (PARinCEECCA)
WG Programme Coordinators:
Veronica Junjan, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Behavioural, University of Twente, School of Management and Governance, Enschede, The Netherlands E-mail:V.Junjan@utwente.nl
Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. Her current research focuses on investigating decision-making processes and public performance management, particularly within the mechanisms and dynamics of public sector reform associated with EU multi-level governance. Since 2008 she has been involved as co-Chair in the coordination of the work of, first the Panel, then the Working Group on Public Administration Reform in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Diana-Camelia Iancu, Senior Lecturer of European Governance, National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Faculty of Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania E-mail:dciancu@gmail.com
Diana-Camelia Iancu is a Senior Lecturer of European Governance and serves as Dean of the Faculty of Public Administration at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration. She was public policy consultant for different international donors (OECD, World Bank Group) and managed a European Social Fund project dealing with blended learning and quality assessment of public administration teaching programmes in Romania. Her research interests include international development and administrative capacity building in transitional countries.
Since the reinventing of bureaucracy and the enactment of new public management, concepts such as entrepreneurial government (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash, 2008), digital-era governance (Dunleavy et al, 2006) and many others became part of the public administration reform discourses across the world. Formerly known as being too rigid to ever change, or too legalistic to be able to perform managerial functions, some bureaucracies do perform well and deliver effective public services. What is the explanation for their success? The present problems of our contemporary, interlinked and globalised societies need solutions: workers search for new job opportunities, families want their welfare to improve, and parents hope that their children will benefit from a clean environment. How can governments react and adapt to provide good governance? Economic and financial crises, poor management or simply corrupt actors often leave governments bankrupt. How can the latter find new sources of revenue to reconstruct themselves? A significant part of scholarly literature on public reforms suggests that the key to answering these questions is the innovative ideas of the people, for the people and by the people.
For the 25thAnnual NISPAcee Conference, the WG on Public Administration Reform welcomes empirical research of academics and practitioners on innovation strategies aimed at enhancing organisational structures, performance and enhancement in the public sector. Accepted papers will preferably be comparative studies that include transitional democracies as a case study.
Note: The papers need to include not only recommendations for further research, but also practical points for practitioners, as well as reflection on the relevance of the paper for EU or for the EU Integration within Public Administration and Public Policy.