PAC Annual Conference 2009

The website for the PAC Annual Conference 2009 is now live at: http://hass.glam.ac.uk/pac/about/

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‘.


PAC Event: RAE 2008 and the Future of Public Administration Research

Wednesday 25th March 2009

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


2008 PAC Annual Conference Review

The 2008 Public Administration Committee Conference – New Directions in the Study and Practice of Public Administration – was held at the Alcuin Research Resource Centre from 1-3 September. One hundred and fifty public policy scholars and practitioners from 24 countries attended the conference to deliberate on the theme “New Directions in the Study and Practice of Public Administration”. The conference, which was organised by Professor Mark Evans from the Department of Politics at the University of York with the support of Ellen Roberts (Social Policy and Social Work) and Professor Matthias Beck (Management), was successful in achieving its aim of providing a creative dialogue between theory and practice in public policy-making.

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.


Sunningdale Accountability Lecture

The 2008 Sunningdale Accountability Lecture was delivered on 29th January by Prof Robert Hazell. Titled ‘The Acts of Union – the next Thirty Years’, the full text of the lecture can be downloaded from this site.


2007 PAC Annual Conference Round-Up

The 2007 PAC Annual Conference was hosted by the University of Ulster at the Stormont Hotel, Belfast, from 3rd-5th September. An archived copy of the programme can now be downloaded from our website.
Pictures from the conference: