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Second phase:  2001 - 2003
(For more details in history of WG look at the Frist phase and Third phase)

 

In the years 2001 – 2002 the Working Group was chaired by new coordinators Dr. Elke Loeffler and Dr. Tatiana Zaitseva who chose “Improving the Quality of Public Services” as the overall theme for the meeting of the Working Group on Better Quality Administration for the Public at the NISPAcee Annual Conference in Cracow. This choice reflected the conference theme – Delivering Public Services in CEE Countries – and also marked a progression from the previous meetings which had focused more on concepts (2000 meeting) and the initiation of quality improvement projects in the public sector (2001 meeting).

In Cracow, the meeting focused on the following themes:
• How quality is put into practice (first session)
• How quality is measured (second session)
• How citizens and other stakeholders may be involved in quality (third session)

 

The selected papers from the Cracow meeting were published in the stand-alone publication: “Improving the Quality of East and West European Public Services”, edited by Elke Loeffler and Mirko Vintar. All contributions went through multi-stage peer review process, in the course of which many papers were significantly changed. The book aims to  present a set of stimulating and challenging ideas on public service improvements to an international audience of researches and practitioners.(see Outputs of the WG)

 

 

With the help of the grant from the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative of the Open Society Institute, the Working group met again during the 11th Annual NISPAcee Conference in Bucharest, Romania on 11. -12. April, 2003, with a topic: ”Measuring the Quality of Life and the Quantity of Governance Processes”.  The papers with this topic  identified new approaches to measure quality that go beyond improving the quality of service delivery alone.  The papers combined the theoretical and empirical elements.
The group was chaired by coordinator  Dr. Elke Loeffler  and Staroňová Katarína.

 

The core objective of  “Public Sector Quality” WG was to provide the floor for the exchange of a wide range of experiences related to public sector quality issues. The group accomplished these goals through the distribution of information through its website (http://www.vus.uni-lj.si/nispa) and book publications. However, there is nothing which can replace personal meetings and interaction. Therefore, the meeting of the WG during the annual NISPAcee conferences was of vital importance.

During its four years of existence the WG contributed to the development of quality management practices in the public sectors of CEE countries in many ways. The results of the WG sessions at annual NISPAcee conferences were disseminated to a wide audience through various book publications, the WG website (http://www.vus.uni-lj.si/nispa) and the NISPAcee website (www.nispa.org).

 

Publication of the best papers which were prepared for the Bucharest meeting. Part of the papers were included into the publication of a special issue in an international public management journal; and selected papers were included into the Proceedings from the Annual Conference