Date:  May 24-26, 2018

Chair:
Külli Sarapuu, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

The Panel on Public Sector Coordination in CEE and Beyond was kicked off at the NISPAcee Annual Conference in Iasi, Romania. The panel drew on the international relevance of the topic and the aim to address it in the NISPAcee region. Although public sector coordination has become one of the key issues in contemporary public administration discourse, the available studies on public sector coordination and core executive dynamics mostly come from long-established democracies, Western Europe or countries with an Anglo-American administrative tradition. There is considerably less knowledge available on coordination in the NISPAcee area and there is a noticeable gap in covering the developments. The panel aimed to fill in this gap.

The panel attracted six abstracts, of which four made it to the conference programme and three were presented. The panel held one session with active debate, engaging the audience (about 15 participants) and discussants assigned to every paper. The papers focused on the interests and actors in the public policy process (presentation by Lazlo Vass), policy learning from financial crisis (presentation by Ringa Raudla) and core executive dynamics in CEE (presentation by Külli Sarapuu). The topic clearly proved relevant for the NISPAcee region, even if it has been modestly addressed in academic research.