A substantial amount of scholarly work focuses on conceptualizing, theorizing and studying the policy capacity of governments. Yet, guidance for practitioners on developing policy capacity training programs is lacking. In this article, I reflect on my experience as a public servant in the provincial government of Prince Edward Island where I…

MPA programs are the only place where public sector human resource management (HRM) is taught. When HRM is not among the list of required courses, programs forgo their responsibility to teach the next generation of public servants why merit-based civil service is crucial to a functioning democracy. The danger of ignorance is reflected in an…

Background: Many different concepts have been invoked in the literature to describe coordination between scientific and policy practices. However, a framework to understand different types of this boundary management is lacking, which allows 'linear' models and 'gap' metaphors to persist. Objectives: To operationalise the multidimensional…

The academic practitioner divide and strategies to close that gap have been important lines of inquiry in the fields of public administration and public affairs. This study contributes to that significant body of work by reporting results from two surveys of faculty in NASPAA accredited programs and of practitioners affiliated with the…

This study analyses the communicative competencies of civil servants in Kazakhstan, highlighting the crucial role of effective communication in fostering public trust and enhancing democratic engagement. Utilizing qualitative focus group discussions with 32 experts, the research identified key deficiencies, including reliance on bureaucratic…

There is an increasing actualisation of the knowledge component of the institutional capacity of local self-government authorities in Ukraine within ongoing decentralisation. The issue that arises concerns the officials' knowledge sufficiency to generate and implement new ideas on the territories' development, and the availability of unique skills…

First Public Lecture sponsored by Teaching Public Administration (delivered at the Public Administration Conference, University of Northumbria 12 September 2018). The author provided views on why public administration is needed now more than ever, outlining how current events necessitate the need for research to inform our teaching and learning.…

The article analyses ministerial staff of the Czech Republic 25 years after the Velvet Revolution. It characterizes ministerial employees during the period of the communist regime in former Czechoslovakia (1948-1989) and following the anti-communist coup. In order to analyse the present-day situation, it uses our own survey of the staff working at…

This paper examines existing management concepts and practices that make up three contemporary approaches to public policy and public administration. We attempt to understand whether municipal public administrators and public administration graduate students validate these perspectives in "reality" versus "ideally." Addressing…

This study originates from ongoing action research that aims to develop institutional opportunities to reflect on and take decisions about inclusion in the School of Accounts and Administration of Rio de Janeiro's State Accounts Office. The research was organized in three phases. The first phase was an inservice course to sensitize professionals…

Senior civil servants (SCS) are powerful actors with great responsibilities in the field of policymaking and management. Due to public sector reforms that are New Public Management oriented, specialised education and structured training programmes for (future) SCS as well as fast-track systems for high-potential employees have become increasingly…

The goal of this paper is to provide a comparative account of tax administration training systems in V4 countries. We also compare their structure to basic training principles, such as those set out by the Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administrations. Because of limited data availability we concentrated on basic characteristics, not on…

According to classical elite theory, increased circulation is related to increased integration which is thought to increase elites' power. Based on a comparative analysis of some European countries' elite education systems, recruitment to elite positions and degrees of circulation--with a specific focus on administrative elites--this article…

This paper reports on part of an on-going interview-based study of the eight permanent secretaries who served at the Department for Education from 1976 to 2012. Following a discussion of the relevance of biography to the study of public sector administrators, it presents a portrait of Sir Tim Lankester. Based on his own account and that of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate workplace learning among municipal officers in the high-learning-demanding organizational context of their work practice in the first year of mandate. Design/methodology/approach: A before-and-after quasi-experimental design was used to assess the effect of time of work practice on learning work…