Salzburg Global Seminar

dossier
Les défis de la fonction publique
Salzburg Global Seminar
Diversity in selection
Par Nathalie Loiseau
Directrice de l’Ena
Avec l’aimable autorisation de
Nathalie Loiseau, directrice
de l’Ena, nous reproduisons
ci-dessous le texte de son
intervention au séminaire
organisé à Salzburg par la
Volcker Alliance, en partenariat
avec le Salzburg Global
Seminar. Fondée par l’ancien
directeur de la réserve fédérale
américaine Paul Volcker, la
Volcker Alliance vise à recréer
la confiance entre gouvernants
et gouvernés, à promouvoir
une gestion publique efficace
et à encourager la recherche
sur les politiques publiques.
Le séminaire, qui a regroupé
les représentants de Harvard,
Yale, NYU, ainsi que d’éminents
spécialistes des sciences
administratives, portait sur
l’articulation entre l’éducation/
formation et la mise en œuvre
des politiques publiques.
24
/ novembre 2013 / n°436
– Why we need it:
Diversity is not just one of these political
mantras whose sense isn’t clear even to
those who first conceived it once it has
been repeated too often.
– Diversity provides legitimacy for the
civil service and therefore trust in public
action.
Citizens want public decision makers to be
representative of the society they work for.
Keeping prominent positions in the civil
service accessible only to children of the
upper-class creates distance and mistrust
between citizens and civil servants. Policy
making and senior public positions should
not be seen as insiders only types of jobs.
– Diversity brings together talents of all
sorts.
Oxbridge in Britain, Sciences Po in France,
not to mention some top American
universities, all are excellent places to
educate students but they tend to produce
a mould and shape formatted individuals. A
changing world doesn’t allow for formatted
minds. Complexity requires Diversity.
–H
ow to achieve relevant diversity in
recruitment
We want the best and the brightest to join
the Civil service. How can we make sure
we attract them and how do we pick them?
– Attract
We must make sure we don’t create or
nurture unnecessary deterrents for joining
the civil service. The first one could be
money. Public service cannot rely on
unaffordable educational institutions. Thus
there are no tuition fees in ENA: you don’t
pay to study, you get paid while you study.
In exchange the individual must make a
commitment to serve 10 years in the Civil
Service.
– Select
As long as we guarantee open access to
entry exams, we have to decide what
criteria we use to select what we still
hope are the best and the brightest.
Should we focus on knowledge, skills,
aptitudes, potential? The answer is not
that simple. Focusing on knowledge brings
to you heads well filled rather than heads
well formed. It has been the main flaw
in administrative exams in a number of
countries for a number of centuries. France
and China have long shared a common
tradition of imperial exams, focusing much
on memorizing and attracting quite a few
“rats de bibliothèque” or shu daize, book
worms to senior positions.
But focusing only on aptitudes or potential
is a challenge: recruitment is not a science
but an art. And if you don’t give sufficient
importance to core knowledge in law,
economics, history, then you have to find
out how and when you fill the gap.
This leads to talk about curriculum.
Educating and training future public leaders
requires us to think out of the box.
How to ensure quality
and continuity in the education
and training of civil servants.
–K
ey points of what ENA has been pretty
good at (and pretty specific about)
We teach know how rather than theory.
Implementation is the key word. The
smartest reform will go nowhere if you don’t
know how to turn it into action. Therefore
we teach how to draft a regulation and
also how to evaluate its impact, how to
draft a budget, how to negotiate, how to
use efficient media communication or deal
with crisis management.
We mainly teach through practitioners
rather than academics. They are requested
to share their experience, turning academic
disciplines into what it really takes to
make things happen. We don’t have a
permanent teaching staff, which may not
rank us favourably in usual university
rankings but which allows us to adapt our
curriculum to the new challenges facing
Public administrations. This also allows
us to have students evaluate teachers on
a regular basis and continue working only
with the most relevant ones. As we believe
in performance oriented public management
dossier
– New challenges
Teaching innovation means you have to
avoid plain reproduction of old practices.
Opening our students’ minds means they
have to think global, understand scientific
and technological evolutions, manage
people, budgets and projects. We certainly
cannot focus on public administration alone.
But we do have to focus on public values,
integrity, ethics.
Going through lessons learnt from past
failures is an absolute necessity. But we
still have to create a culture of tolerance
for mistakes. This culture is much more
present in the private sector than in the
public sector. Accountability shouldn’t mean
you have no right to fail.
Especially if we think we should value risk
takers. And I do think we should.
In conclusion: to face these new challenges,
I think we must cross fertilize: with research,
private sector experiences, international
visions. There is nothing more dangerous
that the thinking that PA should be so
specific that it should not be enriched by
any other discipline.
Fixing the problem of training public
leaders requires breaking barriers between
different worlds which ignore each other
and probably don’t trust each other.
Giving responsibilities in educating future
public leaders to people who are not often
consulted in this field (scientists, CEOs,
journalists, artists, philosophers) we may
hope not only to break barriers but also to
mend fences.
■
Avec le soutien gracieux de l’agence –
and teach it to our students, then we have
to start by using it ourselves.
We make wide use of off-campus education:
students are sent to public administrations
(embassies, governors offices, foreign
PA, European institutions) and to private
companies for several months, with
prominent short term responsibilities, as
part of the curriculum. Their performance
on the spot is evaluated.
By educating students who will fill positions
throughout PA, we believe in creating a
common culture and common references.
By doing so we expect inter agency
processes to go more smoothly and there
to be an easier implementation of political
decisions.
Depuis 2012, Handicap International soutient
la population syrienne, otage des violences armées.
Chaque jour, l’association prend en charge de nouvelles
victimes de blessures par balle ou d’explosions.
/ novembre 2013 / n°436 25