Salzburg Global Seminar
Transcription
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