The fourth day of the 29th edition of the International Conference on Public Administration began with a plenary session titled a “Middle East Administrative Forum” moderated by Dr Sofian Sahrawi, the Assistant Director General of the Bahrain Institute of Public Administration (BIPA).
The session addressed the assessment of public administration in the Arab world, the challenges and opportunities of administrative development in the region, and the lessons learned from the Arab Spring.
The participants discussed the issues of central governance versus local governance; and the institutional structural reforms of public administration including the civil service bureaus, administrative reform ministries, national schools of management and public administration institutes.
During the session, the participants presented local experiences in public administration and their views on that issue. The lecturers involved in this session were, Badr Malallah, the Director-General of the Kuwait-based Arab Institute for Planning; Mohammed Saleh Bin Isa, the President of the Tunisian Association of Administrative Sciences; Adel Haji, from the Civil Service Bureau of the Kingdom of Bahrain; and Dr. Rifaat Al Fa’ouri, the Director General of the Arab Administrative Development Organization (ARADO).
There was also a series of annual scientific lectures launched by International Lecturer and member of the French Council of State Guy Braibant. The lecture, delivered by Gavin Drewry, the Public Management Professor at the University of London, was attended by Professor Pan Suk Kim, the Head of the International Institute of Public Administration (IIAS).
The lecture dealt with three topics, Administrative Sciences between the past and the future, the British public administration experience and future perspectives, and the important roles that national and international organizations concerned with public administration could play.
A number of workshops and sessions were held by IIAS and IASIA tackling a number of sub-themes such as teaching and training, local government and development, democracy and decentralization, capacity development and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), corruption and efforts to create control tools, theoretical and logical foundations of gender equality and leadership development.
A session titled “Quality Governance in Asia” was held by the IIAS project Group and moderated by Andrew Berger, from the Australian National University (ANU), the former Senior General Counselor and Solicitor at the Australian Government, followed by another session on security. The following are the Bahraini researchers and public administration practitioners that presented working papers: Farzana Al Maraghi, Kawthar Al Maawda, Riyadh Al Shawi from the Ministry of Education, Budoor Al Marzouqi from the LMRA, Adel Ameen, Hamad Abdulrahman, Ahmed Mohamed and Mohamed Hassan.
Tomorrow’s activities on the fifth day of conference will consist of several sessions and workshops by international elites of public administration think-tanks and the remaining presentations by the Bahraini work papers.
It is noteworthy that the Kingdom of Bahrain is the host of the 29th International Conference of Public Administration, being held under the kind auspices of His Royal Highness the Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa from the 1st till the 6th of June.
The international Congress is held by The Bahraini Institute of Public Administration (BIPA) in collaboration with The International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) and the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) at the Conference Center of the Gulf Hotel, Kingdom of Bahrain.