Conference Agenda

This study examines the critical need to reposition public administration in South Africa to enhance governance effectiveness and drive sustainable development outcomes. The paper traces the historical legacies of colonialism and apartheid that have deeply shaped the country's public administration system, characterizing it by racial discrimination, systemic marginalization, and inefficient bureaucratic structures. The transition to democracy in 1994 marked a pivotal juncture, catalysing efforts to reform public administration and align it with the principles of democracy, equality, and accountability. However, the legacy of the past continues to cast a long shadow, manifesting in persistent challenges such as corruption, bureaucratic inefficiencies, resource constraints, and service delivery bottlenecks. Drawing on a theoretical framework encompassing New Public Management, Collaborative Governance, and Historical Institutionalism, the study undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the historical context, current challenges, and international best practices to propose actionable strategies for repositioning South Africa's public administration. Key focus areas include strengthening institutional frameworks, enhancing leadership capacity, promoting transparency and accountability, and fostering citizen-centric service delivery. The study concludes that realigning public administration with the broader development goals and aspirations of South Africa is crucial for fostering inclusive growth, social equity, and sustainable development. By addressing the historical legacies and contemporary complexities, this research aims to contribute to the discourse on governance transformation and the pivotal role of public administration in shaping the country's future

This paper uses interdisciplinary ideas from political science and public administration, organizations and management, psychology, sociology, and cognitive sciences to propose a theoretical framework for the study of emotions in governance and the digital age. We develop arguments supporting the centrality of sentiments and emotions in governance-citizens relations, especially in the digital age of public management. As the process of digitization in public spheres deepens, technology and machines intensively replace the human touch in state-individual relations. Governance is revolutionized digitally but, at the same time, also suffers from sentimental deficit and devaluation. Human-human relationships are rapidly replaced by human-machine interfaces where individuals’ sentiments are targeted at non-human platforms. Hence, a theory of “Emotional Digital Governance” (EDG) is suggested to understand those interactions, with consideration of cultural values as potential moderators. Based on this theory, we postulate specific propositions that may direct future empirical studies. Finally, we discuss the potential theoretical, methodological, empirical, and practical contributions of the EDG theory to the study of digital governance and data-driven public administration.

Prof. em. Dr. Dieter Grunow, University Duisburg-Essen/Germany

(Papers prepared for earlier IIAS-conferences are available on: www.risp-duisburg.de)

Proposal for a contribution to Panel PSGII (EGPA-conference 2025)

Background: In 2017 I have edited a reader on “Implementation in Politikfeldern” (implementation in policyfields), which was quite well used for research and teaching. However, rapid changes of the content in the selected policy fields (security, social policies, environment, migration, tax, and others) and new developments in the national and international context (polycrisis, criticism of bureaucracy, growth of right-wing parties etc.) make a new edition necessary. Therefore, it would be helpful to discuss some of the topics of implementation (effects and failures) of public policies in the EGPA conference. The proposal (abstract) describes the selected elements of this complex topic. It would be helpful to have a general scientific discussion and some descriptions should refer to different national experiences (examples of good practice?).

Title: Implementation between policyfields

Abstract

The first part of the paper gives a very short overview of the political-administrative system (PAS) in Germany: the functional differentiation in societal subsystems (system-theory) and the federal architecture.

The second part describes key categories for the description/analysis of the implementation process (top down): starting with the overview (policy-cycle) and including various options (problem-inputs; program-types, administrative architectures, resources, outputs, impacts, outcome). Forms of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the results (solution of problems ((?)).

The main part comes back to the system-theoretic context: complexity and contingency (lack of efficient routines?) as possible explanation of over-bureaucratization, deficiencies, polycrisis and lacking “trust in government”.

In this context one topic will be selected for detailed discussion: policy fields and their interdependence, their mutual resonance. Although policy fields already include many policies (rules), they often cannot be completely separated. Some examples will be described: from the very broad ones (f.e. environmental issues; human security; human rights) to very specific ones (f.e. timetable of schools; public transport; health) or single projects (f.e. repair of streets). The key question: how is/can/should effective cooperation between policy fields be organized – especially on the local level and also with the inclusion of the citizens? Some examples will be described from Germany:

How about Bürgeramt (citizen office); how about “Lotsendienste” (pilotage); how about basic cooperation network (besides issue-network); how about exchange of staff (taking the role of the other); how about “one stop agency” (digital services); how to develop a common mind-set and rhetoric?

The final part includes a summary and a short view on the vertical dimension (bottom up)

Public administration digitalization is a power that promises transformation in both internal administrative procedures and regarding the relationship between the public sector and individuals. However, the practical deployment of AI-driven systems within governmental context can be impeded by two interrelated challanges: the availability and governance of sustainable data sets, and the computational resources required to train and operate high-performance models. Public-sector data often reside in fragmented silos, are subject to stringent privacy and confidentiality constraints, and exhibit uneven quality and completeness. Another issue is that the training and inference phases of modern AI workloads frequently demand substantial computational power, specialized hardware (e.g., GPUs or TPUs), and access to scalable cloud or high‑performance computing (HPC) platforms—resources that many public‑sector agencies lack due to budgetary constraints, legacy IT infrastructures, or procurement hurdles. In this paper, I will analyze these barriers to digitalization by reviewing case studies of AI adoption at different government levels. Drawing on insights from technical literature and policy reports, I will identify best practices for overcoming data fragmentation and democratizing compute access (e.g., public–private partnerships, shared cloud infrastructures). In the final section, I take a closer look at how AI fits into administrative law and the broader rule-of-law framework. I will assess whether decisions made by algorithms exerts pressure on our traditional ideas of administrative discretion, fair procedures, and legal liability. Drawing on the idea of granting “legal personhood” to autonomous systems, I will argue that responsability must be shared for those automated choices among the people who design the algorithms, the teams managing the data, and the end users themselves.