Professor Constantin Marius Profiroiu teaches public policy and good governance at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies where he is the Vice-rector for International Relations. He is Fulbright Senior Alumnus 2010-2011 at Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Kentucky. From May 2014 until May 2016, he was the President of the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee). Also, he is member of European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) since 2015. He was Director-general of the European Integration Department in Romania from 2001 to 2002 and also held the post of State Secretary within the Ministry of Public Administration and Interior between 2002-2004. He was in charge of the coordination of the public administration reform and responsible with the Phare program in the field of civil service reform and decentralization process in Romania. Marius Profiroiu is author of numerous publications in the field of civil service, decentralisation, governance, strategic management.

 

Maja Klun, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana
E-mail: maja.klun@fu.uni-lj.si

Professor Maja Klun started her career at state administration and her academic career in 1994. The Government appointed her as a member of the Government Group for Development of Performance-Oriented Budgeting for the period 2005-2007. In 2007, she has been a contracting partner in the government activities in the field of better regulation, especially in the measurement of administrative costs. From 2009-2013 she was Member of the Government Strategic Group for public sector. Her main research fields are public sector economics and public finance. She took an active part in several national and international research projects from this field.

Recent developments associated to the coronavirus crisis, financial markets governance risks, migratory and demographic trends, and geopolitical instability have brought to the fore with stringency the twin problem of vulnerability and resilience of public administration and governance systems. These developments have shown that focusing only on the efficiency of public administration and governance arrangements is not enough. Moreover, and even more concerning, it has become clear that, in some cases, the search for system-wide efficiency may undermine the resilience of the system. These realities pose a double challenge to the public administration and governance scholars and practitioners. On the one hand, it is necessary to develop better conceptual and theoretical foundations for thinking about the relationship between efficiency, vulnerability and resilience in public administration and governance. On the other hand, it is necessary to develop in practice, at the applied level, new public policy and institutional solutions able to deal with the problems of governance vulnerabilities and its resilience. The NISPAcee 2022 conference taking place in the aftermath of the global coronavirus crisis and cognizant of the shocks received by all - local, regional, national and international - public administration and governance systems, will aim to contribute to the response to these challenges.