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SLOVENIA |
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SLOVENIA |
HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
Slovenia, bordered by Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary, is frequently described as the crossroads of Europe, between East and West and between the Mediterranean and the North. Its small population of two million is a significant characteristic when considering the planning and implementation of European concepts within its public administration system.
Slovenia is fortunate to have a School of Public Administration that enjoys a forty-year history with the public administration system. The experience, contacts and knowledge from the past can be effectively utilised, and it is encouraging that it is not necessary to “start from scratch” or to spend a founding period fighting to become independent from a dominant faculty. The School of Public Administration was established in 1956 as the College of Tertiary Education by decree of the government of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, and its first generation of students, all government administrators, enrolled in 1957.
The school’s first curriculum was based on the need for "general desk officers" capable of quickly adapting to tasks in various sectors of public administration. The curriculum offered comprehensive coverage of the governmental system and social order, political economy and managerial economics, employment relations, finance, economics, statistics and selected areas of civil law and public administration.
At that time, the basic discipline of public administration as a field of study was law (seventy percent of the programme), while economic and organisational subjects ensured an interdisciplinary character and thus produced graduates with a wider range of competence.
In 1958, extramural courses were introduced and regular study courses followed four years later. In most West European countries, the study of public administration was designed as a postgraduate programme for employees who had professional experience in public administration. In Yugoslavia, however, grammar school pupils were also admitted to university colleges of public administration with no professional experience in any field.
After the initial few years, it was noted that graduates were also finding employment in commerce and industry. Therefore, the school altered its curriculum, reduced the number of legal courses and increased the weight of economics and organisational studies courses. By academic year 1972/73, the programme consisted of forty-six percent legal courses, nineteen percent economics courses and twenty-three percent organisational studies. In addition, the first information technology course was introduced during this period. In the following years, the percent of courses dedicated to legal studies was further reduced, as was the number of organisational studies courses, while the economic disciplines were increased.
In 1975, the Tertiary College of Public Administration became a member of the University of Ljubljana. In addition to regular and extramural study, the School of Public Administration has supported relatively comprehensive research work; particularly relevant is its contribution to the development of various forms of education and training for civil servants.
When Slovenia became an independent country in 1991, the pressure for reforming public administration was intense. This was partly due to internal dynamics in Slovenia itself and partly to the encouragement of the European Union. As an associate member of the European Union, Slovenia is developing its PA systems as quickly as possible in order to become compatible with European public administration.
A new law on tertiary education was introduced and, on that basis, the School of Public Administration became a college with a three-year university curriculum in public administration, providing higher vocational education and a degree. Even while that law was being prepared, the School of Public Administration was developing three- and four-year vocational programmes in public administration in cooperation with the Institute of Public Administration in Liverpool, Caledonian University, Glasgow and Hochschule für Verwaltungs-wissenschaften Speyer (the Postgraduate School of Public Administration) within the framework of TEMPUS. Its three-year programme educates professional employees capable of performing substantially diverse professional and also managerial jobs in public administration. The interdisciplinary programme allows the graduates to adapt quickly to changing circumstances in the workplace. This three-year course was started in academic year 1995/96 The School of Public Administration and the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Economics have also jointly developed a programme, “Management in Public Administration,” which started in academic year 1999/2000.
Human resources management is an important new field of study at the School of Public Administration. In cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and with the assistance of the government of Austria and the Verwaltungsakademie des Bundes, Vienna, the School of Public Administration will train fifteen experts over a two-year period to lead comprehensive seminars for civil servants on this subject.
The School of Public Administration is a member of the most active international organisations in the field of public administration (the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration [IASIA], the International Institute for Advanced Studies [IIAS], the European Group of Public Administration [EGPA], the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration [NASPA] and the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe [NISPAcee]).
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