NISPAcee activities will be devoted to institutions, schools and training centres with emphases on the NISPAce member institutions as well as to public servants responsible for training and education.

The political change in the region brought about the challenge of transforming governments, which created the need for new curricula in teaching and training public administration. Previously established programmes, courses, students and faculty recruitment procedures, and methods of teaching quickly became obsolete in the already existing institutions and the new institutions are facing the immense task of finding answers to such problems. The existence of NISPAcee has shown that opening up national boundaries and getting institutions to communicate with each other can help to identify, articulate and find suitable solutions for the difficulties and dilemmas that members face.

Institutions concerned with public administration in Central and Eastern Europe greatly differ. They are organised differently - some are autonomous while others are units of a larger organisation. They differ in their history - some are newly established after the political transition while others have a long-standing history. Some of them are run by the state or regional authorities whereas others have been established as non-profit organisations. They show differences according to their target groups: some offer regular college or university undergraduate education, others are graduate schools only, while some offer just in-service training, still others offer all these programmes. There is also a considerable sub-regional variety of experience, approaches, levels of professionalism and goals (such as joining the EU in a foreseeable future).

While such differences exist, all institutions share common interests and have both short term and enduring concerns. Many institutions are still grappling with fundamental questions concerning national priorities in public administration training and education, with basic questions about institutional structure and curricula, and with practical questions concerning the recruitment of students and faculty. They are subject to a vital but often disorganised flow of information, advice and outright intervention by well-meaning western counterparts. They generally have very little contact with other institutions in the region, and few mechanisms for learning from the successes and mistakes of each other, despite the fact that the transitions affecting their countries and institutions have many fundamentally similar elements.

Well-established institutions have an important political role to play, because they carry the foundations of the national administrative culture on which a new education and training system will have to be built. Public administration reforms in many CEE countries require a new generation of public administration officials who are educated and trained in these institutions. Similarities cut across not only new programmes, but especially across the reform of public management. Most of the countries in the region are too small to have the critical mass of public administration, management and policy experts. Learning from member institutions' successes and failures can speed up professional development.

The public administration profession is in a turbulent period both in the East and the West. It is crucial to create public administration systems in Central and Eastern European countries, including the educational and training institutions which serve the systems, which are able to cope with change, satisfy the present and accommodate the future tasks of governments serving their citizenry. This includes the transformation of the public administration at the national and local level to become transparent. Translated to education and training, this implies readiness to discuss the future and to include public sector management concepts and practice in curricula, even if their application is non-existent in the region.

There is still a considerable deficit in the amount of knowledge concerning present state of national public administration systems as well as requirements for their reform in the region. Public administration reform proposals, implementation efforts, and the content of teaching should be based on a solid mass of empirical evidence. That is why facilitating and the fostering of research, analysing all facets of public administration systems, should be promoted.

NISPAcee, with its established networks, is well positioned to help improve public administration by relying on East-East co-operation. By streamlining guidelines for training inputs in the region and helping information exchange in managing western assistance to training and education in public administration, NISPAcee can take a leading role in pointing out as well the deficiencies sometimes observed in East-West co-operation.