Conflicts resulting in millions displaced and hungered, climate changing with irreversible consequences for the well-being of states and territories, forests and waters, disinformation leading to populism and illegitimate leadership, 2.5 quintillion of bytes of data created every day and a non-fungible token (NFT) sold for 69 million dollars (the most expensive NFT to the present day)  - this is the landscape in which our governments need not only to react, but also to champion change. They need to delicately and sustainably balance equal access, efficient delivery, and competitiveness, while exercising agility and innovation.

 

How can this be achieved? Exploring the governmental capacity, its reforms and (in some cases) de-forms, looking at the success factors, as well as those that impede progress has caught for some time the attention of the scholars of public administration worldwide. This Call is open to senior academics, early-stage researchers, as well as practitioners of "wicked problems management”, open to discuss their own account of the process of building administrative capacity locally, nationally, or internationally. We are interested, in particular, to explain the variety of governmental reactions to different crisis situations, how do institutions become resilient and to what costs?

 

This Working Group has a long tradition within NISPAcee and is widely known for its strong community of thinkers and doers of public administration reforms throughout and beyond the CEE Region and the Caucasus. We invite you to join our sessions in June 2022 and share your more recent projects as well as research papers focusing on (but not limited at):

1.     Solutions for governments to be more agile in their crisis management. References to the current Pandemic, as well as other national, regional or local issues of concern are highly encouraged.

2.     Lessons for the future: what do politicians and civil servants learn from past encounters with the wicked problems? How is society reacting? Case studies on organizational change, as well as public consultations in times of crisis are warmly expected.

3.     Where do we stand and how ca we help? Papers exploring the impact of academic works on the quality of governmental responses when facing crisis are welcome.  

 

Successful applications can be submitted in the form of a research or policy paper.  Exceptionally, essays of the highest quality discussing governmental and societal resilience, as well as the impact of scholarly work on policymaking are accepted.

 

Abstracts of research papers should include a minimal literature review, a clear question and methodology and discuss briefly the main (expected) results.  For policy papers  abstracts should focus on presenting the context and the policy problem, existent alternatives and suggested recommendations.

The sessions of our WG are expected to be highly engaging. Participants are strongly encouraged to discuss their findings and recommendations, network and share their insights and knowledge with a multi-cultural rich community.  The most qualitative and innovative researches focusing on the CEE region and the Caucasus will be fast tracked for publication in a collective (internationally peer-reviewed) volume dedicated to Lessons learnt in Public Administration Reforms in the CEE and the Caucasus. The volume is planned to be published in Spring 2023.