International

Review of
Administrative
Sciences
CAPAM Symposium: Rising to the challenge: enhancing public
sector capability
Editors introduction
Christopher Pollitt
One of the privileges of becoming Editor of IRAS was that I was enabled to attend
my first CAPAM Conference, in Sydney, from 21 to 25 October 2006. I must admit
that, as an Englishman of a certain age, I had had my suspicions of the Common-
wealth Association for Public Administration and Management (CAPAM). Would it
turn out to be a dusty gathering of elderly civil servants, nostalgically longing for a
golden age of imperial order, at which I would feel an awkward, unelected repre-
sentative of the mother country? Well, I am happy to report that it turned out to be
something completely different and far, far more interesting. The Sydney confer-
ence was attended by more than 400 people from 48 countries. The majority were
senior civil servants, but there was also a smattering of academics. The atmosphere
was lively and convivial. No deference whatsoever (thank goodness) was paid to the
UK, and I did not see a single member of the dusty-haired civil service gerontocracy.
What I did see was a vibrant and diverse community, equally interested in the
problems they shared and what made them different from each other. And, above
all, I detected a real passion for improving public services one that had little to do
with contemporary political correctness and everything to do with professionalism
and commitment to the abiding, long-term values of the public service ethic.
Choosing a selection of papers to publish from a much larger number presented
at a conference is always a difficult business. This is doubly true of a conference like
CAPAMs. Many of the presentations are by practitioners and are highly effective for
their immediate purpose, but not entirely suitable for publication in a scientific journal
(just as many respectable scientific articles would make rather feeble presentations to
practitioners). With extensive assistance from CAPAM, we narrowed the multitude
down to ten, and finally down to the five articles which follow this introduction. I

Christopher Pollitt is Editor of the International Review of Administrative Sciences and Research
Professor, Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
Copyright 2007 IIAS, SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 73(4):515516 [DOI:10.1177/0020852307083454]
516 International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(4)

would like to thank our referees, the unsung, unpaid heros and heroines of any good
scientific journal, for their immense assistance in this painful but necessary selection
process.
I would argue that our final selection touches upon a number of the most inter-
nationally widely shared contemporary public management challenges. They deal
with international learning and sharing, the balance between security and privacy in
a world shadowed by international terrorism, complaints and redress mechanisms for
dissatisfied citizens, integrated service delivery and publicprivate partnerships.
Appropriately for CAPAM, we begin with an attempt to pool the wisdom of civil
servants from across the Commonwealth (Laking and Norman). As they conclude, it
is a vital function of training and education to make public servants from many
different places realize that they are not alone in the struggle to make government
work better. This is followed with an article (Stefanick) that addresses the huge issue
of balancing data protection for individual citizens with the prerogative of govern-
ments to protect themselves and their citizens from international terrorism. Stefanicks
article demonstrates that this is not a national problem, to be solved within each
nation-state, but already an international problem of great legal, operational and
ethical complexity. Third, Brewers contribution examines the modalities of citizen
redress of grievances, and, originally, connects this to the issues of privatization and
contracting-out. Interestingly, both Brewer and Stefanick remind us that the law
that original element in the study of public administration remains crucial. We
cannot just take off into some generic management stratosphere and escape the
specificities of national and international law. Fourth, Flumian, Coe and Kernaghan
present a study of multi-channel, multi-jurisdictional integrated service delivery the
Holy Grail that so many governments all over the world declare themselves as seek-
ing. Their sober analysis enables us to understand that here we are dealing not just
with issues of efficiency and responsiveness, but also with even more fundamental
questions of the potential for building trust between citizens and their governments.
Finally, Johnston and Gudergan offer us a case study of a publicprivate partnership
(PPP) responsible for transportation infrastructure a few hundred meters from where
the CAPAM conference took place. Given the widespread international popularity
of PPPs, the cautionary lessons of this particular example may have far-reaching
reverberations.
IRAS (and IIAS) aspire to build bridges between academia and practice. CAPAM is
a highly valued and highly valuable partner in this endeavour. My hope is that both
worlds will find plenty to interest them in this set of articles, and that both worlds
will continue through IIAS and CAPAM to create fora in which our ongoing and
probably never-ending conversation can proceed.