Conference Agenda

The recent sanitary, security, and democratic deficit crises have exposed several vulnerabilities in public administrations across EU Member States. However, these challenges have also accelerated reforms, digitalization, and governance modernization, strengthening institutional resilience.

This article aims to identify key drivers of administrative resilience, the challenges of NRRP implementation, and a framework for scaling best practices to ensure long-term governance adaptability. By providing a data-driven assessment, this paper will offer recommendations for strengthening EU public administration resilience in the face of future crises.

To achieve this, we propose a cross-country comparative framework and adopt a comparative, mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative analysis (European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard, OECD indicators, World Bank datasets), qualitative case studies, and comparative policy analysis to identify best practices and reform challenges.

Lawyers and public managers have grown apart in practice and in academia. In this article, which is an update of a study from 2018, we revisit the idea that administrative lawyers have focused on the judicial perspective and on legal accountabilities for outcomes, where public administrationists have taken on a predominantly instrumental perspective on organizational processes and measurable results. We argue that the unwillingness of both sides to communicate and cooperate is harmful from citizens’ perspective, because law and public administration alike try to influence human behavior. Citizen participation, transparency in public decision making and the realization of good governance norms are subjects that may be at the basis for future exchanges and cooperation, both in academia and in public administration. We also refer to recent tensions brought by crisis management and the ascent of algorithmic state.