Volume 15 (2022): Edizione 2 (December 2022)

The author of the study presents a new approach to the study of dynamic changes in society. He calls it the historical-evolutionist and retrograde approach. The historical-evolutionist approach is based on the existence of the ontology of the problem. It is based on the reality of evolution. This approach makes it possible to reveal on the historical-evolutionary trajectory the key events (factors) that influenced the historical development and to retrospectively identify their historical significance. On the historical-evolutionary trajectory, we can retrogradely trace various events such as: a node on the trajectory, and a breaking point on an evolutionary trajectory, evolution path branching. disruption, dead end, evolutionary island, embedded history, as well as a form of retrograde revealed possible worlds. These concepts are then demonstrated on the example of the history of public administration in the Czech Republic.

Rapid technological progress and its concomitant need for new skills, ways of working and collaborating, paired with dynamic socio-economic change, have highlighted the main challenge facing Europe’s urban municipalities. Being the part of the public sector closest to citizens and their needs, the challenge addresses digital transformation’s goals to support and promote broader growth in the digital domain optimally and to realise digital transformation benefits such as user-friendly and citizen-centred services, increased quality of life and better business environments. Urban municipalities must identify local strengths, priorities and needs, including performance and digital maturity assessment, and define strategic goals and implementation roadmaps to implement digital transformation optimally. Furthermore, they must increase city administration, decision-maker and citizens awareness of the opportunities and benefits digitally enabled solutions offer.

A comprehensive digital maturity self-assessment is the first step towards successful digital transformation. An example of a framework for such an assessment is the framework of the European Commission’s Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC), the EU’s bespoke support programme for coaching, facilitation and inspiration, and successor to its Digital Cities Challenge. Therefore, the objective of our research was to analyse the digital maturity self-assessment results undertaken by eleven Slovenian urban municipalities utilising ICC’s assessment methodology framework for government services and social connectivity, which includes indicators sets of digitising public services, digital connectivity and open data. We further focused on the potential impact of municipality population size on its digital maturity. According to the existing research, this is one of the significant potential explanatory factors why municipalities differ in terms of digital transformation implementation and adaptation.

One would a priori expect larger municipalities to be digitally more mature than smaller ones because they have more resources at their disposal, however, our results prove that this is not the complete picture. There is, however, a relationship between municipality population size and digital maturity, including indicators of open data sharing and security, but not entirely in the manner expected. Furthermore, our analysis has shown that municipality population size does not influence overall digital maturity but individual digital maturity indicators, highlighting the need to develop more detailed and accurate individual digital maturity indicators. Although the influence of municipality population size on overall digital maturity could not be demonstrated, its partial influence on individual sets is essential when endeavouring to achieve efficient digital transformation.

The combination of theoretical principles and centuries-old, yet still functional, practices and institutions that together form the Islamic paradigm of public administration (PA) have customarily been absent from both academic literature and PA reform policies, not least in the NISPAcee region. With, e. g., the arrival of Peter’s Administrative Traditions last year, however, Islamic PA has now been positioned within the mainstream, that is, recognized as a legitimate, contextually relevant alternative to the global-Western paradigm. Accordingly, this article aims to further delineate the Islamic PA tradition by discussing its positionality and significance within Non-Western PA, surveying its normative principles, exploring a set of contemporary case studies in Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Morocco, and concluding with a broader reflection on the importance of contextuality and heterogeneity for good PA.

Literature review implies that despite the Great Recession of 2008 the economic policy paradigm continues to prevail in assessing and measuring the well-being in the EU countries. This means that the institutional goals and the follow-up policies also tend to favor economic over non-economic objectives. This paper examines to what extent the Great Recession has increased or decreased the influence of economic factors on subjective well-being and the implications for policy-making. Regression analysis of subjective well-being data from 2006, 2011, and 2016 from 16 countries from the European Union shows that the influence of economic factors on subjective well-being is stronger than before the Great Recession in the majority of the analyzed countries. It has also revealed that satisfaction with one’s standard of living is a much stronger predictor of subjective well-being than the overall economic situation.

This paper on the case of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic examines the effect of information nudging on changing the behavior of medicine users with unused medicines. We introduce a new concept of nudge into the theory as an explanatory tool used in the form of subsumption. In our explanatory model, explanans represents the initial conditions of research (C). The explanatory theory of ET is nudge theory. Explanandum E is the explained phenomena. The initial conditions consist of two classes of conditions - namely, C0 and C1. The C0 conditions are those conditions that characterize the state where drug users (respondents) act without the information provided by us. C1 conditions are those states where we provide boring information to the medicine users in the form of a leaflet on how to dispose of unused medicines. We examine how the conditions change the behavior of users (respondents) based on the change in the behavior of users (respondents). Empirical analysis shows that nudging in the form of additional information has a positive effect on behavior. Respondents who received additional information in the information campaign about the proper handling of medicines showed a 23.4% increase in the declared return of unused medicines (condition Cl) compared to condition C0 when no nudging was done. We find that respondents who check the expiry date are more likely to hand in medicines at the pharmacy. The more information people have about how to manage unused and expired medicines, the more medicines are returned to the pharmacy. Similarly, people who have enough information return unused and expired medicines to the pharmacy. Therefore, nudging in the form of additional information can be seen as an appropriate public policy tool to increase the effective management of unused medicines.

Cross-border cooperation can be an example of a non-hierarchical co-governance tool based on the principle of multi-level governance, which was successfully implemented mainly thanks to European integration as part of building EU territorial cohesion. As a new tool, it has not been limited by the experience of public administration organizations to date, and it is largely based on coopetition aimed at more effective co-management of border regions. Within the framework of this paper, we are exploring the new point of view in the debate on functional cross-border areas. In the first part of the paper, we shall move towards the establishment of multi-level governance (MLG) and re-analyze the adequacy of this concept in line with the general scientific discourse of functional cross-border areas. In the next part, on the basis of desk research and analyses of public policy, the tools and forms for MLG research as well as their implementation were identified and compared on the national and cross-border levels. In the last part of the case study from the Czech-Polish border, we identify the determinants for the organization and implementation of cross-border public services as a basis for defining cross-border areas functional for fire protection in the Jesenik District (CZ).

Using the example of the Slovak Republic as a post-communist country and its city of Banská Bystrica, this article deals with the dilapidated municipal cultural property which was transferred from the state to the municipalities after the fall of communism in 1989. The long period of disorganization and public administration reforms has left many municipalities with abandoned infrastructures that have not found a new role in the globalized economy. Non-profits often substitute the public sector, especially in the provision of public services where the public sector has a lack of financial and/or organizational capacities and no or very little experience to tackle a specific issue, e.g., handling the abandoned cultural objects that were left to rot. The aim of the article is to investigate the regeneration of the unused property initiated by NPOs. We use retrograde analysis to investigate the impact of social innovation on unused properties. We examine the historical trajectory of individual cases and show what results have been achieved by social innovations. Using multi-case studies and interviews with stakeholders of the non-profits involved, the role of non-profits in the restoration of dilapidated cultural property and its return to use by citizens is examined and conclusions are drawn: non-profits bring social innovations in improving the urban design by saving dilapidated historical and cultural objects.

As a discipline in its own right, public administration has a variety of interpretations in European countries, which can be found at the intersection of three traditional disciplines: law, policy and management. The Central European region, such as the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia), is of particular interest for the analysis of the state of public administration research, as it only came to the fore after the change of regime. The present study undertakes a bibliometric analysis of the publications in the field of public administration in these countries for the period 2011-2020. The publications studied were indexed in the Scopus citation database, and the tools used for the analysis were the Sci Val research support platform and the vosViewer bibliometric analysis software. The results show the different orientations, with Hungarian and Polish authors approaching the discipline from a legal perspective, while Czech and Slovak authors take a management perspective. Regional journals and conference publications dominate in terms of publication places. In terms of co-authorship, regional partners also stand out, while cooperation with Western European countries takes the form of fewer but better cited publications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant changes to the daily lives of citizens, their interactions with their communities, the nongovernmental sector and the public administration, as well as threatening the continuity of the civic initiatives they had developed. This paper draws on the scientific literature on public participation and uses qualitative methods of inquiry (semi-structured interviews) to explore how external factors, in this case the COVID-19 pandemic, affected the public participation of citizens organised in civic initiative groups in Bucharest, Romania. One key contribution of the study pertains to the interplay between practice and the conceptual level of public participation. In this respect, the results showed that many members of civic group perceive it to be genuinely contradictory in practice in their definitions of public participation. However, their ideal visions of public participation in genuine democratic politics are markedly collaborative. The research showed that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on civic groups has been quite limited, adding obstacles to public participation but also enabling opportunities. In particular, it can be concluded that the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing challenges. It should also be noted that co-creation of public services can be defined by a certain level of continuity, especially in the case of civic groups that were involved in co-initiation.

Research on enhancing public participation has increasingly concentrated on using novel instruments to collect opinions of citizens in order to inform the decision-maker about preferred policies. This paper argues that these hardly contribute to the achievement of the classic political-philosophical ideals of citizen involvement if only already active citizens become involved and passive ones remain excluded. Based on the newest European Value Study, this paper first proposes a measure to distinguish between passive and active citizens. It shows that passive citizens do have particular background characteristics in terms of age, education, and poverty. Compared to active citizens, they also adhere to different values as seen in their high adherence to materialistic values, the absence of interpersonal trust, and the much lesser importance attached by them to tolerance and respect. The conclusion is that just collecting opinions through the use of social media and polling, and calling this participation 2.0 or “light” participation, as is proposed nowadays, fails to contribute to the original goals of public participation.