The Working Group (WG) on Democratic Governance of Multiethnic Communities is a forum about effective education and training for public officials to respond to multi-ethnic communities, for research and policy 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, We are particularly committed to exploring how schools of public administration and training centers in the NISPA community can play a leadership role in preparing current and new public officials to work in a cultural competent way in a diverse environment, in line with EU guidelines and legal framework, and can engage in advocacy oriented research focused on the issues faced by multi-ethnic communities.

Our agenda for the working group contains three emphases and we welcome papers addressing all three.
A) Foremost, we seek papers that describe and evaluate initiatives within PA education and training programs to identify promising new practices for training public officials to work in diverse settings, to document good practice teaching and program design cases, to achieve a diverse faculty, to have a learning environment that respects these values, and to mainstream diversity issues, to recruit and support students from diverse backgrounds in the community, to be responsive to language differences in the community and among the student body, and to mainstream diversity in the curriculum. In particular we seek papers that perform a national census of how the education and training services for public administration meet these goals in each country in the region.

B) Also we seek papers that show the impact of diversity training on the performance of public officials and on the outcomes of public policy. We want to assess what the linkage is between good education and training, and real public service outcomes, in order to gauge what is effective and what is not.

C) Finally, as the working group has done from the outset, we look for high quality policy studies about themes of identity and engagement and the participation of minority groups in the social and political life, about tools to enhance active participation of minority representative such as ombudsman and civic engagement, and policy studies that provide suggestions by which local and national governments and their agencies or institutions might regularly assess their performance or demonstrate progress.

We hope from these papers to develop a broad advocacy agenda for the working group to develop a statement of principles of good practice for diversity management approaches in public administration education and training. This statement of principles would highlight the challenges and expectations of effective PA education and training programs; they would not declare solutions. In general, the principles would call for schools of PA to be a role model for the public response to diversity: to have a diverse faculty and student body, have a learning environment that respects these values, to move from understanding to competent action, and to mainstream diversity issues.
The deadline for the application with the paper is extended until October 15th, 2006.