Call for Panel Proposals | IRSPM Conference 2023

The IRSPM board cordially invites you to submit Panel proposals for the Annual IRSPM Conference to be held in Budapest, Hungary from the 3rd – 5th April 2023 hosted by the Corvinus University of Budapest.

For Conference 2023, IRSPM applied a two-stage process for panel submissions:

1. The first call is for Panel tracks for which the abstracts will be solicited in a second round.

Prospective Panel chairs and co-chairs should develop a topic on an important theme of public management, governance or policy, which can accommodate a variety of papers.

This call is open to IRPSM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and to any other colleague with compelling ideas on bringing together people, knowledge, sharing experiences, discussing lessons learned, new methods and concepts, and can include more traditional as well as novel formats for our panels.

2. Once the panels have been reviewed and accepted by the IRSPM Scientific Committee, the Call for abstracts will be open, soliciting abstracts for all individual panels.

IRSPM seeks panels covering a broad range of topics on public management, governance and policy, with chairs from a diversity of countries.  Please note in the case of similar panel submissions, the IRSPM Scientific

Committee can either reject certain submissions to avoid overlap or can ask panel chairs to collaborate in leading consolidated panels to ensure overall coherence of the conference.

The theme of the IRSPM Conference 2023 is:

United or divided?

Public value(s), Management and Governance in turbulent times

External shocks and crises, whether emanating from the natural, economic or international political environment and impacts the realm of public governance, historically deemed to be once-in-a-lifetime events, are increasingly becoming recurrent or even part of “business as usual”. Practitioners and academics alike are making increased efforts at finding ways to prepare governments to tackle such crises and operate robustly under such unexpected and extreme conditions. At the same time, crises represent moments when taken for granted values and ways of doing things come to be re-discussed, re-considered, and re-prioritized, and conflicts, and differences emerge starkly, to bring about re-prioritization, the building of new compromises, and ways of governing and organizing public services and policies. In parallel to these tendencies, other types of tensions and crises created by existing and new societal cleavages cutting across individual societies are becoming more and more visible, too. These chasms, created or exacerbated by diverse mechanism and actors ranging from populist politics and social media to hostile foreign governments, frequently mirror fundamental divisions along key values within societies. They may give rise to new conceptions of the public space, and of ways of governing and managing it, which more closely reflect the plurality of perspectives in our societies, and translate it into stronger forms of accountability, engagement and interaction between citizens and governments. Yet, in other cases, they may also undermine the legitimate and sound operation of public institutions and policies and call into question the societal values and principles governing key policy areas, crucially weakening societal trust and thus the governability of societies. These trends are further strengthened and exacerbated by an increased use of social media, and more generally, by processes of digitalization which have come to become increasingly pervasive. Whereas these trends appear in diverse geographical and political contexts, their implications on public management has, thus far, received limited scholarly attention, despite their critical importance.

In addition to the numerous questions of general relevance for the field of public management the conference thus welcomes, in particular, panels investigating questions related to the causes, processes, consequences and remedies of the above, complex set of phenomena:

· What are the conditions, mechanisms, and processes creating socio-political, cultural or other types of value conflicts into “game-changing” cleavages in public governance?

· What are the implications of such division for public policies and institutions, their operations and the outcomes they produce?

· What are the actual and possible responses to these trends, and how do contextual factors influence the dynamics of fundamental value conflicts affecting public governance?

We are now calling for panels on the conference theme and related issues from different perspectives. We welcome IRSPM SIGs to address these and related issues alongside their ongoing focal themes.

All panel proposals should include:

1. Title of the panel

2. Name(s), affiliation(s) and contact email addresses of the chair(s), including:

· A corresponding chair that will act as a corresponding chair (or single point of contact for future communication with IRSPM)

· A review group chair to be responsible for leading the group of abstracts reviewers.

3. Panel topic description (maximum of 100 words)

4. Background information outlining the experience of the chair(s) in running panels at academic conferences (IRSPM and/or other)

5. Brief description of the Panel format – standard panel presentation with respondents, roundtable, mini-presentations, etc.

Attention：

1. Proposals should be around 500-700 words in total and not exceed two pages.

2. Panel proposals must be submitted in English.

3. Panel proposals should be submitted via e-mail to: conference@irspm.org  by Monday, 1 August 2022

4. Notification of accepted panels will be provided by 21 September 2022

5. The Call for Paper Abstracts will open on 21 September 2022

Physical participation only! An important note to panel (co-)chairs: the conference will be organised as a ‘physical event only’. Therefore please ensure that you are: a) committed to participate in person in Budapest and b) do not propose hybrid or online activities.

Be sure to check the new website for regular updates: www.irspm.org 

issued by 

IRSPM Board

IRSPM International Research Society in Public Management

c/o University of Bern, Center of Competences in Public Management (KPM)

Schanzeneckstrasse 1, 3001 Bern, Switzerland