In the frames of the 2023 NISPACee Conference, a Panel on Policy Development and Coordination was organized and conducted for the second year. This year’s panel aimed at discussing the application of horizontal policy development and coordination practices in the national public administration system, covering, challenges and best practices of regulating and standardizing government’s policy planning, monitoring/evaluation systems as well as the institutional aspects of the coordination and hierarchy involved in it. 

Initially, the panel had four submissions for papers. Out of four co-chairs accepted three papers to proceed, while for one paper recommendations have been made to the authors to revise the scope of the topic. Once the changes have been made, the fourth paper was also accepted for the panel. Towards the deadline of submission, one selected paper has been withdrawn as the authors did not finalize the registration for the conference. Therefore, for this year’s conference, three papers have been presented in the panel.

The panel was conducted on May 26, 2023, in Belgrade, Serbia. Professor Dr. Juraj Nemec, from Masaryk University in Brno (temporary co-chair of the panel in the absence of Professor Dr. Ivan Koprić) and Giorgi Bobghiashvili, from Caucasus University, opened the panel to the audience and presented the authors of the papers. In total around 10 persons attended the panel.

The first presentation provided an analysis of the governmental transformation in the background of the European Migration crisis with a detailed analysis of the cases of Slovenia, which was one of the transit countries on the Western Balkans route and was therefore under immense pressure from the influx of migrants in a very limited period. The primary assumption of the papers was that the inability of the government to respond, reflect and learn during that crisis served as a catalyst for change in the Slovenian government.

The second paper provided an analysis of the coordination of the innovation system policy of Uzbekistan with assumption that the as Uzbekistan produces fewer innovation outputs relative to its level of innovation investments, there is a positive impact of coordination on the development of innovation in the country. The article described the changes in the innovation policy coordination system, analyzed data from authoritative open sources for the period from 2014 to 2021, and evaluated the impact of various factors on the economic and innovative development of Uzbekistan using regression analysis.

The third presentation compiled a comprehensive single case study on the national EU integration policy coordination in Georgia since 1991 to date to ground Georgia’s case in the existing academic literature in two broad areas of knowledge: how coordination happens in the specific PA models and how the coordination systems evolve in aspirant and EU member states. The paper finds that, unlike the prevalent pattern in EU policy coordination, whereas the relative stagnation of the EU coordination process happens after the accession, in Georgia this has occurred during the onset of the conditionality stage (2014-to date), which makes this an outlier case.

Each presentation was followed by assessments and questions from the co-chairs as well as questions from the audience. Professor Dr. Juraj Nemec also provided recommendations to the authors of each paper on the ways of proceeding with papers. The first (1. European Migration Crisis As a Catalyst for Governmental Transformation: The Case of Slovenia) and second (2. Innovation policy coordination: the Role of Communication for Uzbekistan) papers were recommended to be included in the NISPAcee Conference Proceedings. 

The authors of the third paper (3. National EU Integration Policy Coordination in Georgia: Evolution of coordination models and contingent factors) were recommended to revise a few aspects and would be eligible to submit for publication in the NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy.