KeyNote Speakers

Keynote Lecture

Professor Catherine Needham

The 21st Century Public Servant Revisited

In 2014, the 21st Century Public Servant report was published, looking at the skills, roles and values of people working in local public services. The resultant framework identified ten key characteristics associated with the public service worker and challenged organisations to consider how to adapt practice to meet current and future needs. Ten years on, the public service context has changed. System shocks such as the Covid pandemic and ongoing recovery, Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis are reshaping public service work. This keynote will report findings from a new project which has worked with public servants to see how the challenges of the last decade have impacted their work and what skills, roles and values they require to thrive.

https://21stcenturypublicservant.wordpress.com/updating-the-21st-century-public-servant/

Biography:

Catherine Needham is a professor of Public Policy and Public Management in the Health Services Management centre at the University of Birmingham Her research focuses on social care, personalisation and coproduction within public services, new approaches to public service workforce development and interpretive approaches to public policy. Catherine is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Frank Stacey Lecture

Professor Paul Cairney

What does policymaking look like?

Wouldn’t it be nice if academics and practitioners could have frequent and fruitful discussions about policy and policymaking? Both professions offer mutually informative insights on policy processes. However, it is notoriously difficult to explain what policy is and how it is made, and simple images can mislead as much as inform. Academics and practitioners may also present very different perspectives on what policymakers do. Without a common reference point, how can they cooperate to discuss how to understand and improve policy or policymaking? I argue that one starting point is to visualize policymaking in many ways to identify overlaps in perspectives. To that end, if academics and policymakers were to describe ‘the policy process’, could they agree on what it looks like? To help answer this question, I present a variety of images used to describe what policymakers do, need to do, would like to do, or would like people to think they are doing.

https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/2023/02/13/what-does-policymaking-look-like/