IV. Working Group on Democratic Governance of Mult

Petra Kovacs, LGI/OSI, Hungary,
E-mail: kovacsp@osi.hu
Jana Krimpe, Tallinn University of Educational Sciences, Estonia,
E-mail: krimpe@tpu.ee
Michael Brintnall, American Political Science Association,
E-mail: Brintnall@apsanet.org

NISPAcee Project Manager:

Viera Wallnerova, Email: wallnerova@nispa.org

Theme 2004:
“Diversity and Public Services: Introducing New Standards of Diversity Management in Changing Europe”

Background

The Working Group (WG) on Governing Multiethnic Communities had its fourth gathering at the 11th Annual Meeting of the NISPAcee. The working group continued its discussions about promoting inclusive policies responsive to the needs of ethnically diverse communities, and about the design, implementation, and administration of public services that help to advance the status of minority communities and promote the well-being of the majority and minority groups together.

For its fifth gathering at the 12th Annual Meeting of NISPAcee, the WG decided both (1) to continue its focus on developing a series of policy studies to provide suggestions by which local governments and their agencies or institutions might regularly assess their performance or demonstrate progress; and (2) to expand its attention to focus on the ways that public officials are prepared for managing public services in a multiethnic environment and specific steps that might be taken to improve this training. By adding to the field research available that can identify key factors of successful practice in providing equitable access to public services for minorities, and by applying these lessons to effective development of good basic education and training techniques for preparing public servants to manage in a diverse world, we hope to combine scholarship and practice, leading to meaningful long-term change in public administration and its response to ethnic diversity, equal opportunities and non-discrimination, particularly at the sub-national levels of government.

Call for Papers

Officials as well as citizens are often frustrated in their attempts to get a clear picture on the performance of government's achievement in promoting inclusive policies responsive to the needs of ethnically diverse communities. Comprehensive information and analysis is rarely available on the issue equity in public service delivery. And public officials are often untrained or unprepared to deal with the new and complex demands of managing public services in the face of ethnic diversity and majority-minority conflict.

We are calling for papers of two kinds. First, we continue to seek policy studies that provide suggestions by which local governments and their agencies or institutions might regularly assess their performance or demonstrate progress. Second, we seek evaluations of the ways in which public officials are educated and trained to respond to the challenges of public service delivery in multi-ethnic democracies and practical examples and recommendations of how such training and education might be improved.

The aim of our inquiry is both to add to the stock of knowledge about what policy actions are effective in improving particular situations, and then to apply that knowledge to concrete understanding of how public officials are educated and trained, and how that process of preparing public officials can be improved.

We are interested in particular in papers with a focus on curriculum and training issues that NISPAcee might lead in developing -- questions of how to help current public administrators, and future ones now in the PA schools, to learn to manage in a multiethnic environment, steps to assess and advance how the PS schools and training centers are doing in recruiting diverse classes of students, from all ethnic groups, into their programs, how active they are in having faculties or available speakers and experts on these questions, and how they can evaluate their own training and education programs to assure they are responsive to these needs.

Discussions of the working group will be organized around five sub-topics:

The impact of the EU Race Directive (legally binding as of July 2003) on public service delivery in EU accession countries
Evaluation of the local impact of central governmental programs aiming at social integration of minorities
Monitoring the performance of local initiatives for managing ethnic and social diversity (donor and central government perspectives)
Training as a tool to improve performance in diversity management and equal opportunities (assessment of methods, main approaches)
Regional experiences in training civil servants on diversity management and equal opportunity policies
Designing public administration degree programs through new curricula, minority student recruiting, and faculty development to prepare public servants for managing in a diverse environment

A preference will be given to papers based on empirical research (case studies), on papers that provide empirical evaluation of education and training practices, and of papers that link an understanding of policy experiences with the education and training needs they call for. Guidelines for writing papers are available on the NISPAcee website.

For further information, please contact the coordinators (see the contact information above), or write to the email list of the working group nispawg4@yahoogroups.com