1.1 EGPA 40 Years On
One purpose of this book is to celebrate an important achievement for a learning societyāits 40th anniversary occurred in 2015āand to inform the reader of all that has been achieved by it over the past four decades, and what it is set to do for the next ones. The European Group for Public Administration (EGPA1) is a European learned society devoted to the study and practice of public administration (PA) which has been steadily growing over its initial 40 years and is nowadays thriving, as the many accounts of its impressive range of activities reported throughout this book will testify. The very fact that a regional group for the study and the practice of PA and management in Europe is thriving points to the second purpose of this book: making the claim that there is a deep need for a regional learned society for PA in Europe, as there is a need for thriving regional learned societies in other areas of the world.
What we argue is that there are functional, cultural and institutional reasons that underpin the significance of a regional group, that is, for establishing a platform for researching and studying PA at an āintermediate level of governanceā between the national and the global levels.2 This argument is worked out in this chapter and represents a common thread throughout the book, where the various chapters point at different facets of this underlying major claim and provide further evidence for it.
The starting point for this book is its predecessor book: the EGPA 35th Anniversary Book edited by Geert Bouckaert and Wim Van De Donk (2010). What is covered in that book? Perhaps first and foremost it is the people of EGPA and of PA in Europe: the innumerable persons that contribute through their professional life to the initiatives of EGPA. In that book their professional stories across generations and countries are vividly depicted. There are pithy personal testimonies in that book as well as in-depth reflections (the two often intertwined) probing into such issues as the relationship between national languages and the study and practice of PA in Europe; there are accounts about the journals where European PA scholars publish more often and about the other learned societies and associations that are active in the field and contribute to fostering PA in Europe. Yet other chapters of that book contain invaluable insights into such issues like the institutional embeddedness of PA, that is, the question of where PA scholars are located within the European academic institutions (in political science departments, or in business schools, or else?), or the issue of the composition of the funding that supports research on PA and public management that is being carried out in Europe (e.g. what is the relative significance of national funding vs. European Union [EU] funding), or the characteristics of education and training of public administrators in Europe.
This book builds on the 35th Anniversary Book and adopts a distinct, and altogether complementary, take: while the emphasis in the predecessor book was on the people, the emphasis here is on EGPA as an institution. In fact, EGPA has over these 40 years become part of the institutional landscape of Europe, and for this very reason it was felt appropriate to provide the European as well as the broader PA community across the world with an account about EGPA and its manifold activities: its history and its multiple stories of contributing to the knowledge and the understanding of PA. More specifically, this book sets out to address three main questions:
- 1.What is a learned society which has the nature of a āregional groupā for the study and practice of PA ultimately for? What is its contribution and what āoutputsā can be expected of it?
- 2.How has the study and practice of PA in Europe changed over 40 years? And how has EGPA contributed to it?
- 3.What will PA and management be like in 40 years from now? And what can be expected of EGPA to contribute to ābetterā PA, public governance, public services and public management over the next 40 years?
The second and third questions are effectively addressed throughout the rest of the book: scholars who have played a key role in directing each of the nowadays over 20 EGPA Permanent Study Groups (PSGs; they were 19, plus the francophone seminar and the PhD seminar, in 2015 when EGPA celebrated the 40th anniversary) have been asked to both report on the past and look to the future of the specific area of inquiry in PA that is being researched by the Study Group they direct. Other chapters are dedicated to major EGPA initiatives, like the Transatlantic dialogue conference series developed with the American Society for Public Administration, and many others. A detailed overview of the structure of the book is reported at the end of this chapter.
This introduction develops some initial reflections to tackle the first question: what is a regional learned society for the study and practice of PA for? In order to address such question we argue that there are functional, cultural and institutional reasons that provide the rationale for a PA regional group in Europe.
1.2 Cultural, Functional and Institutional Reasons for a Regional Group on PA in Europe
1.2.1 Functional Reasons for a PA Group in and on Europe
We would first argue that there are functional reasons for a PA group in and on Europe. The generation of speculative and practical knowledge for PA requires a certain combination in the degree of similarity and dissimilarity both in the object of study (the public sector and public services management) and in the subjects of investigation and inquiry (the scholars researching PA and public management, the practitioners developing the insightful knowledge required for practising PA as an art and a profession).
The argument we put forward here is that Europe may be the āproperā scale and level to combine similarities and dissimilarities: the national level is too narrow,3 the global level is in a sense too wide and may contain too high a degree of dissimilarity for many research projects to be meaningfully carried out. This is not to discard the major significance of both the research carried out at the national level only, and the research that has the ambition to be totally āglobalā in its reach, namely encompassing the varied realities of the public sector and public services across the globe, possibly in the quest of some law-like generalisations.4 What we argue is that these two levels of researchānational and globalārequire an intermediate level in-between, one that bridges and links research efforts at the national level (mostly carried out through national research institutions and national learned societies) and those carried out at the global level (where the International Institute of Administrative Sciences āIIASāto which EGPA belongs as its regional European group, represents a reference platform for global-level research, nourished and supported by its regional groups). In this sense, a regional group is functional to the more effective running of research work; it is in a sense a key production factor in the production function of research in the field (to borrow from the language of economics).
Europe represents a region of the world which is also especially facilitated in providing an almost natural intermediate level of governance for research efforts. The very research policy of the EU , putting a premium on cross-country studies, has provided a natural venue for comparative pan-European research projects to unfold and thrive. The significant funding stemming from the EU level has provided both major resources and powerful incentives for national research institutions to collaborate intensely at the European level. These conditions are more difficult to replicate elsewhere in the world, since the EU is a unique construction, which currently has no parallels elsewhere in the world.
There is yet another sense in which the EU has been important: the very multi-level administration of the EU has become an object of study in itself, mostly carried out by European scholars, an endeavour which can only be fully attained by cross-national pan-European teams of researchers.
1.2.2 Cultural Reasons for a PA Group in and on Europe
There are also powerful cultural underpinnings of a regional group for the study of PA in Europe. In the aftermaths of the tragedy of World War II, a European āidentityā with political and not just cultural bearing has started to develop. Albeit nowadays challenged by powerful forces, such European identity has been a key driver of efforts of integration in Europe, not just of an institutional kind (the establishment and development of the institutions of the EU) , but also cultural. I dare to state that European scholars, across all disciplines and surely in the field of PA, have over time acquired a European identity which sits comfortably alongside their national one. Indeed, scholars in the EGPA community feel totally European exactly as they feel totally national of their own country, without any conflict and rather in full co-existence of the two identities, which are inseparable, and indeed one needs and nourishes the other. And alongside the national and European identities, they cultivate a global identity, as members of the professional and epistemic global community of the PA scholars. EGPA is surely a place where multiple identities live and reinforce each other.
As noted elsewhere (Ongaro and van Thiel 2018), there is both a strong assumption and a humble recognition in the assumption that in the field of PA ācontext does matterā (Pollitt 2013). In our field, knowledge rarely takes the shape of universal laws (see e.g. Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, ch...