Welcome and opening speeches

Gyorgy Jenei,  NISPAcee President

Jusuf Kalamperović, Minister of Internal Affairs and Public Administration,  Montenegro

Rajko Kuljaca, President of Municipality of Budva,  Montenegro

Svetlana Vuković, Director of Human Resources Management Authority of the Government of  Montenegro

Violetta Zentai, LGI Representative, Director of the Center for Policy Studies, CEU, Budapest, Hungary

Allan Rosenbaum, IASIA President, Florida International University, Miami, USA

Jacek Czaputowicz, Director of the National School of Public Administration, Warsaw, Poland

Montenegrin expert in public administration

Milan Marković, President of Constitutional Court, Montenegro

Presentation:  Public administration in Montenegro

Keynote presentations:

Ceremony of the Alena Brunovská Award for Teaching Excellence in Public   Administration
Presentation of the Award by Gyorgy Jenei, NISPAcee President and Ľudmila Gajdošová, NISPAcee Executive Director, to the recipient:

Mirko Vintar, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Public Administration, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Presentation: Public administration & IT: Is it time to get married?

Health care is one of the most frequently discussed, debated and reformed public service branches throughout the world.  All countries, including those in the CEE region, attempt to improve the delivery of health services with varying degrees of success. Papers in the panels compare processes and outcomes of health reforms in the CEE region, including explanations for successes and failures, as well as health service delivery issues. Goals of the two panels include discussion of core problems of health reforms in CEE conditions, including problems of delivering health services; convening experts in the field to discuss further steps of co-operation; and improving links to international organizations dealing with similar issues. 

Panel discussions will be focused on few very sensitive topics: ethical dimension of the public policy process, the decentralization’s impact on the corruption phenomenon in the public administration, the ethics from the socio/cultural perspective and other subjects raised by the participants.

It will be an open discussion where the participants will be kindly invited to intervene for presenting experiences, examples and successfully ethic’s guidelines from their countries. We encourage the dialog with the participants for discovering the best practices for increasing the integrity of the public organizations, which institutions succeed in curbing corruption in one country or another.

During the discussions we will try to identify how the education, in general or the special training programs , in particular can influence the changing of the human resources behaviors for a more ethical one and how the results could be measured in time.

Our panel will be a discussion’s frame for exchanging best practice experiences with practitioners and engaged scholars for setting up an integrated action plan containing the most successful actions and institutions from different countries for fighting against corruption. 

The purpose of the panel is to provide a forum for discussion of and sharing experiences on the use of policy analysis within governments and the teaching and training of policy analysis in academic and governmental institutions.  The papers and presentations show the challenges in teaching policy analysis in various countries and the discussion will give an opportunity for the exchange of information on the experience of how policy analysis contributes to achieving a more sustainable economic, social and political environment.  The panel also serves as a place where the participants might highlight achievements of policy analysis as an academic discipline and  its value within governments.  The participants will exchange information on the best practices. with a view to having greater acceptance of public policy analysis.

The Fair is a new NISPAcee initiative. The purpose of the Fair is to encourage members and other interested individuals and institutions to engage in creative thinking and identifying possible new projects, activities, partners and donors etc., to come up with ideas for discussion during the Fair and to reach decisions by the participants on the proposals that could be further developed and coordinated by NISPAcee. Identification of possible relevant donor organisations will be also discussed.

The Fair would provide opportunities for networking, development of partnerships, identifying demand-driven project development and for the strengthening of the umbrella and coordination role of NISPAcee on the joint activities of members.

Several initiatives have been selected for the Fair programme to be presented and discussed. Additional proposals from the conference participants are also welcome for presentation during discussions.

Project title: The UNDP Regional Centre for Public Administration Reform (RCPAR)

Presenters:

Anne Caroline Tveoy, Policy Specialist, RCPAR

Panos Liverakos, Team Leader, RCPAR
The Regional Centre for Public Administration Reform is a fairly new five-year regional project launched by the United Nations Development Programme, Bratislava Regional Centre and primarily financed by the Hellenic Government. The project aims at facilitating professional networking and co-operation between the countries in the region of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Thematically, the Regional Centre focuses on strengthening capacities for policy-making and coordination; improving public finance management; enhancing organisation and staffing in the public sector and promoting public service delivery. Through its philosophy, design and operational mechanisms, the project offers significant opportunities for countries in the region to engage in the formulation and implementation of multi-country initiatives funded by the Regional Centre. Network members, consisting of practitioners, academics and other experts from the countries in the region, are actively encouraged to submit ideas and develop proposals, involving a minimum of three countries in the region, within one of the thematic areas. The funding available for each initiative is around US$100,000, and the project aims at generating at least six initiatives per year. Guidelines and application templates are available at www.rcpar.org. UNDP sees the project as a major anchor for regional programming on public administration reform in the coming years.

 

Project title: Establishing the Eurasian Institute for Leadership Development in Public Administration at Siberian Academy for Public Administration

Presenter: Marina V. Tyasto, Siberian Academy for Public Administration, Russian Federation

The aim of this proposal is to develop best leadership training technologies, train the trainers and disseminate new courses and training among educational institutions in Siberia, other regions of Russia and the countries of NIS, especially Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan).  EILDPA, as a geopolitical site for international collaboration between East and West, will promote Leadership as a driving force for changes and particularly for introducing and developing good governance education programmes in Eastern Russia and neighbouring Asian countries.

The UNESCO Chair “Leadership in Public administration and management of socio-economic processes” at SAPA, as an academic umbrella, will promote the concept of leadership for human development educational programmes for diverse target groups from all sectors in Siberia and Asian countries and will form and widen the Eurasian educational space. Partners are welcome!

 

Project title: Civil Service Capacity Building for Change Management

Presenter: Nuripa Mukanova, Academy of Management under the President of KR, Kyrgyzstan

Despite lasting efforts to reform the public management in the Kyrgyz Republic, the issue still rests on the lack of a high professional civil service that will serve as change agents. The problem remains to be a lack of training programmes that shift formal training from classroom teaching to problem solving. The proposed fellowship project has been designed to support practical policy and public management reforms by building capacities of talented and committed government officials who are well placed to influence policy, practical implementation of reforms and serve as change agents. The fellowship project will provide its fellows with training to formulate effective policy to solve particular problems, to determine particular steps required for its implementation and evaluate progress against agreed milestones.

The proposal will be presented to the NISPAcee community due to the invaluable worldwide experience that NISPAcee has accumulated in providing such training and projects. What we would like to achieve during the Fair is to attract possible international partners and to learn about possible donors of such a project.

 

NISPAcee introduced a new WG at the annual NISPAcee Conference in Bratislava (2008).
Based on the outcomes of the first meeting, the working group decided to focus on the problem of city-regions because of their increasing importance everywhere in the world and the specific post-communist process of quick suburbanisation. Cities become the centres of the new service- and knowledge-based economies, while their governance becomes more complex.

The working group will focus on three challenges the CEE and NIS countries
presently face:

1. The governance problem. Large cities have more and more important suburbs. The agglomeration and the city tend to form a more and more unified functional unit in terms of economic processes, job market, transportation and social life. This functional merging is often hindered by the fragmentation of metropolitan areas: the central city is relatively small, while suburbs preserve their autonomy. Finding a solution for this challenge is an important item on the agenda in many countries.

2. The developmental problem. City-regions are the motor of change in the world, and also in post-communist countries. The communist economy, based on forced industrialisation, has been transformed into post-industrial economy in metropolitan areas. Successful transformation countries have successful cities. Public administration reforms are also
expected to contribute to the success of city-regions.

3. The decentralisation problem. City-regions are very important, sometimes so important that they dominate the life of the country. Big cities, typically capitals, tend to over-centralise economic, social and political life. The political elite, rich businesspersons and famous actors
mostly live in the capital. Such big cities successfully divert resources to the detriment of other areas. Well-designed policies are needed to rectify that problem.

The Working Group studies Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications in the area of public administration and analyzes their impact on the relationships between government (administration) and business, government and citizens, and government departments between each other. The special geographical focus of the studies and analyses are in the Central and East European (CEE) countries. The public administrations in these countries share some common problems related mostly to the transition from very rigid bureaucratic administrative practices, commonly used in the past, to modern, more flexible, governance policies and approaches. Thus, the special interest of the workgroup is to evaluate the contribution of ICT applications to the transition process and its success. Apart from the transition problems, most CEE countries are also concerned with the readiness, i.e., the level of technological development that allows for implementation and proper use of ICT solutions in public administration, as well as the sophistication of the developed ICT applications, which usually lag behind the similar indicators in other EU countries. Papers presented by WG members contribute mostly to the exchange of best practices and experiences between CEE countries and provide valuable materials for education at a higher vocational and academic level. WG objective is to establish a common framework for facilitating a more formal exchange of best practices, where the transfer of knowledge can be monitored, documented, and evaluated, or facilitate comparative analysis of good practices that would go beyond single country borders.

Public Administration Reform forms an important tier of public administration in each CEE country. A contemporary problem is the small amount of comparative and empirical research in the theme of PA Reform in the CEE countries.

The activity of this Working Group aims to provide a structured forum on the dynamics of public administration reform in the NISPAcee region, including New EU member countries, non EU countries, all post-communist countries including Western Balkan as well as Caucasus countries and Central Asia. Public Administrative Reform is described as any restructuring of the administrative part of the public sector in order to solve organizational and/or societal problems associated with this structure and intended as promoting a professional, merit-based and neutral civil service.

The activities of the proposed Working Group  provide an opportunity for academics and practitioners to meet, reflect upon, and discuss their experiences in a structured fashion.

The ongoing and radical transformation of the public administration in Central European countries raises a series of interesting theoretical questions, questions that have a serious practical relevance. Democratization theory and the focus on the political institutions represented the first framework of analysis for the changes that took place in CEE.  The EU accession negotiations opened the territory for a second, technocratic defined agenda of directed change. The transformation in many of the Central European countries seems to have been successful. Eight Central European states did become EU members in 2004, and two other states in the region following step in 2007.

The trajectories of change that the Balkans and Central Asian Countries followed after 1989 were characterized by different sets of confrontations. For the Balkans, the 90’s brought not only challenges associated with state formation and wars. The reconstruction, first addressed within the political reform and accession to the EU, was framed as a goal, but the political evolutions (with the exception of Slovenia) hindered the administrative transformation. Central Asian Countries pursued the path of transformation slower, and without the prospect of EU accession. The impact of international organizations was more diverse than in the CEE, encompassing both Western European and North American influences. These different paths give a unique opportunity to investigate the differences in process and outcomes of PA reform that starts because of internal pressures (demand based) and that starts on the basis of external incentives (supply based).

These developments result in a number of theoretical and empirical questions. For instance, was the Public Administrative Reform mainly administrative in character or was it also intended to serve the public side of public administration? Were (re)developing of the civic spirit and civil involvement related, and if so, according to what mechanisms, to the maturing of the internal demand to reform public sector institutions? Was PA Reform mainly internally or externally based? Had citizens and civil society organizations something to say in promoting and requesting reform in the field of public administration, and if, so, what was it and how was that accomplished? Which factors influenced the success of domestic demands to reforms PA institutions?

The questions addressed in this working group are:

1. What explains successful Public Administration Reform (in post-socialist countries)?
1. What are the factors that lead to the effectiveness of reform in Public Administration in post- socialist countries?
2. What relationships can be identified between the actors that assist in the development and functioning of the reform?
2. What effects are visible because of Public Administration Reform?  Does it, for instance,  lead to the development of democratic governance in post-socialist countries?  If so, what mechanisms are in place and how do they function in order to achieve this goal?
3. What can be learned from past experiences and how can processes of Public Administration Reform be improved in order to become more effective and efficient?

Working Group focuses this year on municipal asset management in the NISPAcee region in the context of fiscal decentralization. The main goal of the research is to review the experience of the individual countries using the case method.

Property is one of the basic pre-conditions for autonomous local government. All the post-communist countries went through the process of public property devolution, which started after the new democratically elected parliaments approved the basic laws. Regardless the approaches to property devolution the individual countries applied, at the moment municipalities in all the countries in the region own various types of property and have to manage it.

Next to the elaborated country studies a few papers related to various issues of local government finance will be presented.

The development of civil servants' administration skills is one of the conditions for an increase in public service professionalism, impartiality and transparency. The civil servants' continuous training system is closely related to the strengthening of administrative capacities and new quality creation according to the conditions of the Europe and Eurasia. The main objective of public administration and public policy is to create a civil servants' training system, which would be integrated and governed by central and local government and to evaluate the development of the system and related programmes.
The following relevant problems related to improvement of public servants training and professional development will be discussed: new challenges to develop public servants training system under conditions of globalisation, EU enlargement and knowledge society establishment; progressive experience of public servants' training accumulated through international practice; establishment and development of public servants training systems, development and implementation of national and international strategies for improvement of such systems.
The main attention will be paid to the following issues: new challenges for the improvement of public servants training, studies and qualification quality; new experience accumulated in CEE countries, members of the EU, while improving public servants qualification and organising teaching and studies; new phenomena and problems which silhouetted after EU enlargement; integration of scientific research elements into processes of training and qualification improvement.
The results of the workgroup will be characterised by a resolution. It will determine the main priorities of the work group: progressive experience of public servants training accumulated in the world practice, EU countries and other countries; new challenges, new opportunities and new teaching technologies which are to be taken into consideration under conditions of EU enlargement; experience of public servants training accumulated; analysis of current situation; development of public servants training systems and implementation of long-term strategies; development and implementation of international programmes and projects in the sector of public servants training.

The Forum will serve universities with EAPAA accredited educational programmes and for universities interested in EAPAA accreditation.

Information about the EAPAA, established in 1999, and all related documents for accreditation of public administration programmes can be accessed through their website http://www.eapaa.org/. The Forum aims to provide institutions and individuals from the NISPAcee region with an opportunity to learn in more details about EAPAA businesses and also with an opportunity to contribute with comments and proposals on the EAPAA activities and functioning. Invited speakers will share with the conference participants their experiences of already successful accreditations and preparation for accreditation. These speakers include the General Secretary of EAPAA and representatives of programmes which have already been accredited. Opportunities for accreditation of PA programmes from CEE countries will be discussed. Members and potential members of EAPAA are invited to participate.

Working session I   - in  the meeting room Zeta

Moderator and rapporteur:
Biljana Nikolovska Zagar, Civil Servants Agency, Macedonia

Themes: State civil servant – in general; How to attract and select the best candidates; Should we plan the employment/staffing plans; What is the best way of selection; Announcement of vacancies; Announcement procedures and the time period for the realization of them; How to eliminate nepotism, and the policy influence on the recruitment process?

Working session II - in  the meeting room Bojana

Moderator and rapporteur:

Damir Ahmetovic 

Themes: The Recruitment process and selection; the Commission process for the selection of capacities;  Commissions are skilled for the selection of candidates trained to do their job appropriately? Qualification of assessment (testing, interwievs, etc);  The list of best candidates; Is the recruitment process based on the merit-system?

Presentations of the rapporteurs of both working sessions:

14.00-14.15 Working session I
14.15-14.30 Working session II

Programme:
Opening
Annual report of activities
Financial report
Future plans
Elections
Other
Discussions

Discussion in the WG about the continuation 2010 and priority topics (facilitation Hans Rieger, Patrycja Suwaj).

Guided tour to Kotor

15:00 – Departure by buses from the Hotel “Splendid”

-         Sightseeing Kotor

-         Boat trip to Perast, around islands Sveti Đorđe and Gospa od Škrpijela, Tivat

18:30 - Arrival by buses from Tivat to the Hotel “Splendid”