Professional Approaches to Policy Making - Beyond New Public Management -

Civil Service Reform in the 21st Century and Required Skills for Professional Policy Makers

In this session, participating governments will be asked to present their basic ideas on civil service reform in the 21st Century with particular stress on their thinking of the required skills and competencies for 'professional policy makers' and the ways to assess and enhance these skills and competencies.

Skills of 'Professional Policy Makers' as can be sampled out from the cases

In this session, participating governments will be asked to present policy making case studies. The session will be divided into three parts.

In the first part, each party will be asked to present a typical policy development case in a more or less similar policy area (in order to facilitate comparisons of the scopes of the functions of civil service with respect to policy making across countries). Each case study will describe the entire picture of a particular policy development process and identify the steps taken by civil servants involved. Comparing cases across the countries, would allow to construct a "common directory" that will cover a wide range of steps taken by civil servants of different countries in developing policies. The directory will constitute a foundation on which the discussion can move on to the second part.

The second part of the session will focus on finding good practices in policy making. Each government will be asked to come up with cases where innovative approaches were adopted in specific aspects of policy making. Possible topics could include:

- Business-government relation
- Central government - local government relation
- Joining up with NGOs
- Evidence-based policy making

The last part of the session starts by comparing competency frameworks of various governments and government agencies. Each government or government agency will make a presentation on the basic idea and structure of their competency framework and its relation with the nature of policy making environment they are confronted with. Since competency profiles usually cover a wide range of aspects, emphasis will be placed on the profiles that are directly related to policy making skills. Differences in the roles of civil service and policy making processes among the participating countries highlighted in the first part will be used in comparing competency frameworks among different governments. Academics will be invited to provide a perspective on how we could meaningfully compare competency frameworks of different governments. Participants then will discuss what differences among competency frameworks have produced, and what they could learn from each other's approach in constructing competency frameworks.

Educational Program for Enhancing Policy Making Capacity and International Cooperation

During this session, participants will discuss effective ways in which senior civil servants could enhance their policy making capacity. Representatives of governments and graduate schools of public affairs are invited to present their thinking on effective ways to enhance policy development capacity of senior civil servants.

In particular, emphasis will be placed on effective ways of knowledge-sharing and good practices in policy making across departments, across governments, as well as between governments and the private sector, through the use of case studies. Further discussion will be conducted on how to link shared knowledge to competency framework and evaluation of individual civil servants. Finally, productive ways of coupling governments' in-house training programs and educational programs provided by graduate schools of public affairs as well as that of the private sector will also be discussed.