Exploring the Frontiers of Public Administration

With this year's theme, we will focus on the future. As a newly established learned society, ENPA has the ambition to explore the frontiers of public administration scholarship in Europe from a European values perspective: what is our community for, and for whom? As a field which is empirical, applied, and which combines explanatory and prescriptive approaches, public administration needs to constantly question:

The first question brings us to the heart of what we do as academics: knowledge creation. Notably, we believe that this knowledge creation should be embedded in a context that is characterized by (a) urgent challenges the public sector faces in terms of pressing societal issues (e.g. climate, energy, security, technology, health, innovation) and (b) shifting normative stances (e.g. executive aggrandizement, contested democratic spaces). What is more, PA as a field and an academic discipline will increasingly have to collaborate in an interdisciplinary manner with other fields of inquiry. Public administration research needs to draw from a range of disciplines – alongside the social sciences, these are the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) and Life Sciences on one hand, and the Humanities on the other hand – and develop a two-way interaction with these disciplines, if we want to continue to deliver knowledge needed to keep the public sector and public services relevant and strong in the contemporary challenging contexts.

The other two questions go to the heart of our stakeholder community: knowledge transfer and knowledge interactions. We believe that what we do needs to result in relevant and research-based advice and various forms of support and enablement for practitioners (policymakers, public managers, professionals, public officials, civic leaders, voluntary sector workers, etc.), and relevant joint knowledge creation, to enable them to continuously work towards the best possible public sectors and policies. In other words, what we do is also inspired by the mission to create and preserve public value and good governance. Next to that, we need to educate future generations of scholars and practitioners by offering state-of-the-art programmes in PA, in which students learn (lifelong) state of the art knowledge they can implement in their future and current professions.

It goes without saying that we are a European learned society, and while we principally represent European scholarship in public administration and aim to address challenges of public administration in and for Europe, we are fully conscious that in order to address such questions and challenges in a meaningful way we must do so with a global perspective. ENPA and its European partners therefore liaise with learned societies worldwide in this undertaking, and we therefore welcome contributions from all regions of the globe.