Many of the countries who have applied to become EU members have progressed quite far in meeting the requirements of the Association Partnerships in terms of incorporating many parts of the acquis and transposing many of the Community's legal rules into their national law. In this working session NISPAcee aims to analyse the effects of these legal changes, identify the many remaining challenges for CEE public administrations to integrate successfully with the EU, and analyse the relevance, advantages and disadvantages of this process for the NIS countries if applicable. The tempo of reform engendered by the EU accession process has placed the changes in the CEE pre-accession countries at the vanguard of the entire agenda of public administration reform.

The working session programme will be structured around the following themes:

Developing Administrative Capacity to Meet the Requirements of EU Membership

What efforts have been made to upgrade general administrative capacities to meet the demands and criteria of EU membership? The area of necessary reform is large: increasing the performance orientation of management, attracting and retaining highly qualified staff, ensuring the impartiality of the civil service, improving human resource management, strengthening public confidence in the public service, reducing the opportunities for corruption, changing civil service laws to integrate European service and ethical considerations, embedding civil service values in administrative institutions, improving the effectiveness of institutional structures, improving the quality of legal regulations, and more. What barriers have been encountered? Even though countries are at different points on the reform path, what prospects and plans for future reform are shared? To what extent will the OECD/SIGMA's definition of a 'European Administrative Space' help in planning, measuring and prioritising reform?

Developing Sustainable Training Systems

Training systems are an essential component of other assistance measures, such as the Twinning programme, whose benefits may be captured only with a strong training system and improved human resource capacities. The subject of much debate in recent years, training remains however an obdurate area of organisational reform. What is necessary to go from plan to action in the area of training for European integration? Can too much planning stifle action? What mechanisms have proven necessary for the institutionalisation of successful long-term training of civil servants?

Facing Dilemmas and Resolving Conflicts

The urgency of the integration process and the enormity of tasks that are necessary to complete may create distortions. Can the haste to conform to EU priorities draw resources and energy from the tasks of public administration modernisation? Are academic and training investments balanced in view of the long-term healthy development of public administration capacity? Is it possible to maintain historical peculiarities – culturally determined institutions and procedures – given the pressures towards harmonisation? Is the 'Europeanisation' of the transformation process a purely healthy phenomenon? Also, are the standards demanded by the EU reasonable and realistic? And are there other, better ways to inventorize and assess progress in the pre-accession process?
 

Ten years of transition has led to different achievements in different countries. Examples of successful Public Administration progress and reform, as well as failures vary from one country to another. The candidate countries to EU have to deal with aquis communitaire and the specific challenges of EU integration on their public administration systems. What are the challenges faced by all states in the CEE and NIS regions? All have undergone post-communist transformations and are fundamentally reforming their political, economic and administrative institutions, although not all in view of EU membership. But how similar is this process from country to country? The relative advances of several CEE countries are serving as models for some of the less-advantaged states. Reforms and solutions to difficulties developed in the CEE countries could be of utmost relevance to the NIS states due to the historical, conjunctural and institutional similarities between the transition countries.

The working session programme will be structured around the following themes:

Developing Public Administrative Capacity: Successes and Failures

What has been achieved? What are the lessons learned from successive waves of public administration in a given country or in the region? What are the tasks for the development of sustainable and successful training systems? This working session will also address the issue of how to increase systemic capacity for learning from experience – both failure and success - for the benefit of future public administration reform.

'Europeanisation' without the EU? The Effects on the Newly Independent States

What is the relevance, the advantages and disadvantages of this process of European integration in CEE for the NIS countries? Designing administrative mechanisms for the effective implementation of new laws and improving the reliability of the public service is a common necessity throughout the region. Training is a universal need. To what extent are the developments in the NIS states affected by the developments in CEE and the impact of a broader process of ‘europeanisation’.

Steering Public Administration into the next Century

What are the main challenges for public administrations in CEE and NIS countries in the years ahead? Promoting democratic consolidation and economic development while preserving social unity, pluralist societies, and the rule of law are likely to be enduring ones. The capacity to adapt to changing external conditions and the ability to attract and retain the human potential are just two of the key factors which will determine the quality of public administrations in the region.