Abstract
Societies and are constantly evolving and a continuous source of new demands for public sector organizations and executives working at the top of these organizations. Broader changes in the external environment such as demographic change, climate change, technological developments, and decreasing levels of trust in government institutions as well as shifts in the political environment have been described as “megatrends” with a major impact on the future of public administrations (Pollitt 2014). This goes along with an increasing interest in state capacity and the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies (Fukuyama 2013) and discussions both in academia and practice evolve around ideas of government effectiveness, government productivity, the quality of public administration and meritocracy.
At the same time public administrations in many countries are still struggling with the effects of the 2007/8 financial and economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies (Hood et al. 2014). Such developments naturally have far reaching implications for the work of public sector executives. They are facing the pressure to drive digitalization, increase productivity and effectiveness and at the same time make governments more transparent and open and care about the engagement and motivation of their staff and improve the attractiveness of public administration as an employer. They increasingly have to balance rather different roles and identities such as ensuring impartial implementation of laws and rules, achieve results and efficient use of resources but also to get public sector and non-governmental organizations to work together and develop new policy agendas. In such an environment management and leadership competencies resulting from education, experience and training are ever more important (Van Mart and Hodeghem 2015).
It is in this context that we consider top executive and mid-career programs offered by universities for the public sector as an important driver to increase public sector professionalization and government capacity. Academic executive programs cannot afford to be disconnected from the major questions and challenges governments are now facing. As noted by Jodi Sandfort & Kevin Gerdes in this special issue, executives require significant skills across a broad spectrum of competencies to cope with these new challenges. We want to explore in this special issue how far executive master programs for the public sector (EMPAs) which have steadily grown since the late 1960s and flourished especially in the late 1990s and early 2000 (Holmes 2007) are reacting to these new demands and challenges. And in spite of their rather long history we still have rather limited knowledge about how executive programs are developed and implemented and how they adjust over time. This special issue brings together contributions from different geographical areas and programs that help us better understand the current developments and challenges of academic executive education in order to ensure their relevance for the public sector of the future.
This special issue includes nine articles based on experiences from different executive master programs in Europe, the USA and Brazil. Apart from Christoph Reichard’s article which examines the current state of executive education in Europe, all contributions present insightful and rich case studies of quite different strategies and ways these programs are adjusting to ensure their relevance for public sector practice. This approach allows the reader to gain rich information and current insights from different executive programs with regard to the challenges, new directions with regard to content and pedagogy and implementation experiences in different country contexts.
The contributions to this special issue on public administration executive education have been selected along two major criteria. The first five articles evolve around broader key challenges that public sector executives and executive programs are facing today such as austerity pressures, a new demand for service orientation and inter-organizational collaboration, the quest for the right leadership competencies and values and the need to foster a specific public sector motivation but also the more enduring question of how to integrate theory, practice and research in executive education and training. The four articles in the second part of the special issue provide a more in-depth insight in specific executive programs by providing concrete experiences and a more longitudinal approach of developing these programs. By bringing together these nine articles we are able to present a unique and very current picture of the changing landscape academic management education in Europe and the Americas.
Key challenges for public sector executive education
The special issue opens with an article from Chrissie Oldfield’s on the rather dramatic consequences of austerity and adversity for both public managers and public management education programs. By analysing the effects of the economic crisis and spending cuts in the UK the author argues that despite an increasing need for executive training to effectively deal with new uncertainties and the managerial challenges of retrenchment and declining staff morale, the demand for public management education is falling. Costs and content of such programs are under scrutiny and management educators have to seriously reconsider their academic programs and show that they are of great relevance and value. Based on the experiences from the London Sought Bank University Executive MPA Chrissie Oldfield highlights the need for adjusting executive education towards a more flexible and “bit size” program which combines of a more modular portfolio, in-house courses delivered off-site, a ladders and bridge framework and continuing professional development. Though executive programs cannot solve all the problems and challenges that public organizations confront, such an approach can create the safe environment for discussion and analysis as well as respond to the participantś specific workplace challenge.
Fabrice Larat in his article on the current developments at the French national school of public administration (ENA) stresses that institutions in charge of training leaders must not only provide them with knowledge and skills, but also ensure that leaders have the qualities required for the exercise of their responsibilities in each stage of their professional career. This requires a comprehensive and integrated strategy as developed by ENA based on a competency framework defining the required leadership and management competencies, a well-developed approach of identifying and selecting potential leaders and a training scheme integrating successive steps of training for different levels of executives. The article also describes the difficulties and obstacles of implementing such an ambitious strategy.
Alexander Hiedemann, Greta Nasi and Raffaella Saporito in their article demonstrate how much executive management programs can profit from applying a public service-dominant logic (Osborne, 2010). Based on experiences from the EMPA program offered by SDA Bocconi School of Management in Italy, the authors argue that such an approach has a positive effect on the structure and curricula of executive education because it considers the participants as active stakeholders at the heart of the delivery process and enhances public action through a consequent focus on inter-organizational capacity and the coproduction of learning outcomes. The authors see their article as an invitation to teach what we write, to practice what we teach and to teach through practice and emphasize the need to differentiate executive education for public administration from classical MBA programs.
Martijn van der Steen, Mark van Twist, Paul Frissen, Paul ‘t Hart, and M. Fenger, from the Netherlands, present an innovative and comprehensive approach to deliver executive education by systematically integrating theory, practice, education and research. More specifically, the authors emphasize that professional experience of participants not only is a key resource of knowledge and insight to be used in training programs as didactical building block but which can also contribute to public administration research. They present the didactical format of “learning ateliers” developed at the Netherlands School of Public Administration that intertwines education and research. Using professional experiences of practitioners as building block for both training and interpretative administrative research this helps to overcome the divide between theory and research and “turns the classroom in to a place for learning, a place of practice and a place of research”.
Leonard Bright completes this first part of the special issue with an article exploring the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) as concept currently very much in vogue in public management research and student satisfaction in public administration programs in the US while considering the environment and the studentś years of government experience. The findings confirm a significant positive relationship between PSM and student satisfaction, but also show that this effect was completely mediated by program climate. The article stresses the importance of a supporting environment and climate of executive education programs but also argues that public administration executive programs should not neglect the public service motivation of candidates during the recruitment process.
Insights from current developments in academic executive programs
The second set of contributions to the special issues start with an overview article from Christoph Reichard’s article. The author uses a cross-national comparative perspective to examine the landscape of academic degree programs for experienced public administration students offered by higher education institutions throughout Europe and presents a very diversified picture of this type of education. By analysing executive programs with a view on the institutions offering them, the target group, the contents, didactics and job opportunities afterwards, the author concludes that national differences of civil service systems and different public administration traditions (Kickert, 2008) still play a major role when designing and implementing executive training programs.
Through a longitudinal approach, Carsten Greve and Ref Pedersen examine the development of the Master of Public Governance program in Denmark and lessons learned. The authors describe the evolution of this flexible and modular master program for public managers which was enabled through substantial government resources. The author describe the programś development, structure, content and innovative teaching approach as well as an assessment of its outcomes. Key learnings presented from this case are the need of securing government back-up for such a large program, the need to offer a flexible array of accessible and up-to-date courses and to ensure collaboration between different universities offering the program.
Jodi Sandfort & Kevin Gerdes’s article describes and assesses a model of professional education designed to build capability, agency and responsivity among public affairs professionals in the US to engage win complex public problems. The program is characterized by an unconventional schedule and course design that emphasize the importance of communication technologies to support and facilitate the learning experience. The article describes the specific teaching practices applied such as action learning and project-based learning and key results from implementing this program. The authors warn that technology is merely the means to an end that that online courses will be hampered without careful attention to course design, pedagogical approach and especially nuanced judgements of teaching practice.
Finally, the special issue closes with Regina Pacheco’s article, which reflects based on experiences from Brazil upon the necessity to offer mid-career programs for public managers that combine theoretical and conceptual education with training and practical approaches that deal with the daily challenges that public managers face. In this vein, the author defends the need for interdisciplinary programs that differentiate themselves from academic programs, and that offer practical tools for problem-solving to public managers.
We hope this special issues will help to stimulate improvements of both content and pedagogy of executive education programs for the public sector in a world of constant change, by sharing a rather wide spectrum of experiences and insights from experienced scholars and different programs. As Daniel Pratt points out “learning is an interactive process of interpretation, integration, and trans-formation of one’s experiential world’’ (Pratt, 1993: 17). And through executive education especially in the area of public administration we need to assure outcomes not only with regard to knowing, but also networking, belonging and becoming (Han and Liang, 2015).