NISPAcee Panel at ASPA Annual Conference inaugurated in Las Vegas

One of the features of the Memorandum of Understanding which was signed between NISPAcee and ASPA, the American Society for Public Administration, last May in Varna, was the creation of a NISPAcee panel, showcasing the NISPAcee region and research done in and about it, for ASPA’s annual conference, mirrored by an ASPA panel to be established at the NISPAcee conference.

The 2012 APSA annual conference took place from 2 to 7 March in Las Vegas, Nevada, and a very good slot on Saturday, 3 March was given to the NISPAcee panel, which was very well attended, also by the leadership of other Public Administration societies. Led and chaired by former NISPAcee steering-committee member Wolfgang Drechsler from Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia (TUT), it started with a short introduction of NISPAcee and its mission by Executive Director Ludmila Gajdosova and a remembrance of NISPAcee’s recently deceased President, Mzia Mikeladze, by Professor Drechsler.

The four papers which followed, and which were all eagerly discussed by the audience so that there was too little time for all, represented the variety and quality of NISPAcee research and its different regions; all speakers were recent recipients of various NISPAcee awards and scholarships. The first papers dealt with the CEE countries and classical empirical questions of PA Reform: Veronica Junjan, University of Twente, The Netherlands, originally from Romania, spoke about "What should the Government really do? Attitudes and Expectations towards Public Administration Reform in Central and Eastern Europe,”

and Tiina Randma-Liiv from TUT addressed "Challenges for Public Service in the New Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.”

The third and fourth papers focused on the Western Balkan, South Caucasus and Central Asian regions of NISPAcee and questions of Governance: Wolfgang Drechsler asked, "’Islamic’ Governance – The Missing Dimension of ‘Second-World’ Public Administration Scholarship?”, and Aziz Klebleyev, Florida International University, USA, originally Uzbekistan, analyzed "The Developmental State in Uzbekistan: Soviet Legacy or Innovative Good-Enough Governance?”

Altogether, it was felt that the establishment of the NISPAcee panel at ASPA was very successful and substantial. The upcoming NISPAcee conference in May in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, will follow with the inaugural ASPA panel, chaired by Stephen E. Condrey, ASPA president-elect, and under the title "Public Administration in Post-Communist Countries,” it will encompass papers on Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian PA and PA Reform by scholars hitherto unaffiliated with NISPAcee. The general ASPA panel series is chaired by Meredith Newman, ASPA immediate past president, and Wolfgang Drechsler. The next NISPAcee panel at ASPA will take place at the 2013 annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.