30th NISPAcee Annual Conference

"Crises, Vulnerability and Resilience in Public Administration"

June 2-4, 2022

Bucharest, Romania

Panel: Governance and Politics of Small States

Chairs:

Külli Sarapuu, Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, email: kylli.sarapuu@taltech.ee

Jack Corbett, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. J.Corbett@soton.ac.uk

– Report

Many states in the NISPAcee region can be characterised as small. They may be small in relative terms compared to their larger neighbours, but very often they are also small in absolute terms because of their small populations. The panel "Governance and Politics of Small States” focused on discussing the manifestations, relevance, and impact of the size of states on politics, public governance and public policies in the NISPAcee region.

Two sessions were held as part of the panel. The first session featured four academic research papers that addressed the impact of state size from different disciplinary perspectives. The importance of small country size was examined in the context of EU energy security, political institutions in European microstates, public sector corruption and administrative performance.

The aim of the roundtable discussion in the second panel session was to start a debate in NISPAcee on the impact of population size on administrative outcomes. The roundtable featured three panellists—a fourth was unable to attend because her working group meeting was rescheduled—who discussed a variety of topics, including how and why is size (however defined) important to the practice of public administration in all states, large and small? How would paying greater attention to size change conventional, mainstream theories of public administration? And how can taking size seriously shape administrative reform, especially in the context of NISPAcee countries? Our audience of about a dozen people contributed to a lively discussion. The main contribution was the need for a more explicit attempt to speak to the mainstream debates by developing an  in-depth empirical analysis of the effects of size.