This year’s conference will explore the theme on Public administration in an era of austerity and will include papers on all aspects of public service organisation and delivery.

More information and booking can be found at: www.ntu.ac.uk/pacconference2010

Nottingham Business School, 6-8 September 2010

Convener: Dr Mike Rowe, University of Liverpool

The PAC is committed to developing the field and the researchers in that field. We run a doctoral stream each year for researchers wishing to present their research to a supportive audience at an early stage. This might be to test out your emerging findings, to outline your proposed research methods or to present your review of the literature. We are expressly concerned to help you shape and develop your ideas at whatever stage of the process you are. We invite paper proposals from PhD and DBA students. Your outline should briefly summarise your research progress to date and locate the work in the wider public administration literature. You should indicate how your research ideas will contribute to this field.

Sage will once again be offering a prize for the best paper from a doctoral student presented at the conference.

Bursaries for Research Students
There are also a limited number of Bursaries to enable current PhD or DBA students to attend the conference (intended to cover travelling expenses within the UK). For further details contact Professor Joyce Liddle, Professor of Public Management and Head of the International Centre for Public Service Management at Nottingham Business School.

Please send proposals (no more than one side of A4) with your contact details to:

Dr Mike Rowe

University of Liverpool Management School

Chatham Street

Liverpool

L69 7ZH

Tel: 0151 795 3613

Fax: 0151 795 3004

Email: michael.rowe@liverpool.ac.uk

The conference will take palce at Glamorgan Business Centre, University of Glamorgan, between September 7–9th September. The theme will be ‘Competing Narratives of Public Service Reform – Politics, Devolution and Service Improvement‘.

London Voluntary Sector Resource Centre
356 Holloway Road, London N7

12.00 Lunch and Registration

13.00 Lessons from RAE 2008

• Chair: Oliver James, PAC Vice Chair (Research)
• Peter Taylor-Gooby, Chair, Social Policy Sub-Panel
• Christine Bellamy, Member, Politics and International Studies Sub-Panel
• Martin Laffin, Member, Business and Management Sub-Panel

2.30 Break

3.00 Research Funding Futures in the Social Sciences

• Chair: Martin Laffin, PAC Chair
• Phil Sooben, Director of Policy and Administration, Economic and Social Science Council
• David Sweeney, Director (Research, Innovation and Skills), Higher Education Funding Council for England

4.30 Close

Attendance is free to all staff from JUC member departments, a fee of £50 will be charged for participants from non-member departments. The closing date for registrations is 11th March 2009.

To register contact: Sandra Odell, JUC Secretariat, Graduate School – Business, Law and Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU. Tel: 0115 8488117 Fax: 0115 8488700 Email: Sandra.Odell@ntu.ac.uk

The conference included eighteen panels on contemporary problems in governance encompassing such issues as risk and public policy, public participation, working across boundaries, measuring public sector performance, joining-up government, the politics of obesity and drink and governing the competition state. A Practice Forum was organised by the PAC, the Public Management and Policy Association and the National School of Government and was led and moderated by Sir Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the Home Civil Service. In addition, workshops were organised on ‘Developments in MPA Education’, and, in keeping with the internationalisation theme, the PAC joined forces with the National Public Administration Steering Group in China to organise a further panel of leading Chinese scholars to discuss problems in the contemporary governance of China.

Two special lectures were organised for the occasion. Jocelyne Bourgon (President Emeritus, Canada School of Public Service) delivered the inaugural National School of Government Lecture at the Kings Manor on the theme ‘Reclaiming Public Administration’ and Professor Rod Rhodes, Distinguished Professor from the Australia National University, presented the Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture on the topic ‘Observation, interpretation and public administration: scenes from life at the top’.

The conference also included papers delivered by research students. Sage publishing and the journal Public Policy and Administration generously agreed to support a ‘Best Graduate Paper’ prize which was awarded to Daniel Horsfall from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York for his brilliant paper ‘From Competition State to Competition States?’ The conference also benefited from the participation of Erasmus Mundus postgraduate students undertaking a two-year MA in Public Policy at York and international practitioners engaged in York’s highly successful campus-based and E-learning MPA programmes.

As Mark Evans put it, ‘this year’s conference was particularly successful in bringing together senior practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplines and countries to explore key problems in contemporary governance’.

A selection of papers from the conference can be found on the JUC web archive.

• The Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture was delivered by Sir Hugh Orde, Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland
  
• Edward Goldenberg, Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister of Canada, 1993-2003, delivered the opening lecture.