Project News
INTERNATIONAL VIDEO SESSION ON CIVIL SERVICE REFORM IN VIETNAM
One of the secondary objectives of the Academy/Princeton Institutions for Fragile States Initiative is to train young professionals from around the world for work in institution building. This objective has been incorporated into the Masters of Public Administration program at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. Under the School’s policy workshop program, each year two teams of MPAs are required to pick an important topic for institution building in developing and post-conflict countries, find a real world client for work on that topic, conduct field interviews and research, and submit an analysis and recommendations to the client.
On February 6, a team comprised of MPA candidates from the Phiippines, Peru, India, Finland and the U.S. submitted their analysis and recommendations to implement recently enacted civil service legislation in Vietnam via a videoconference between Hanoi and Princeton. An audience of 70 attended the session at Vietnam’s Institute of Public Administration. Participants included representatives from Vietnam’s government, Vietnamese scholars and NGOs, the UN Development Program (the initial real world client for the study), the embassies of a number of donor countries, and international organizations. Much of the report focused upon recommendations to shift from a purely career-based civil service system to a position-based system, allowing for lateral entry of qualified candidates, particularly in the higher echelons. The report also called for decompressing the compensation schedule so that positions involving greater responsibility received higher compensation compared to those under them than is provided under the present system. The report will be posted on the web once additions and amendments suggested in the February 6 meeting are incorporated into the final report.
The team was mentored and led by Clay Wescott, a long-time advisor on civil service and public administration reforms at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. He participated in the May 2007 Workshop on international experiences with civil service reforms sponsored by Princeton’s Bobst Center and the National Academy of Public Administration.
WORKSHOP ON UN PEACEBUILDING
The Institutions for Fragile States Initiative hosted the first of two workshops on UN peacebuilding operations at Princeton January 31. Convened at the request of the director of the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office, the workshop will be followed by a second at the end of February. Both are addressed to the question of how peacebuilding operations at the UN should be organized and function. Participants included leaders of UN peacebuilding in the field and in New York. A few scholars expert on the subject were also invited to take part.
Participants included:
Salman Ahmed, Chief of Office and Special Assistant to the UN Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations; Antoine Baza, Principal Counselor for Political and Diplomatic Affairs for the Vice President of Burundi; Prof. Carles Boix, co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics; Lisa Buttenheim, Director of Asian and Pacific Affairs at the UN in New York; Winnie Byanyima, Director of the UN’s Gender Team; Prof. Charles Call, Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace; Manuel Aranda Da Silva, Senior Adviser to the Director of the World Food Program; Wolfgang Danspeckgruber, Director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton; Prof. Harold Brown, of Columbia University, author of Making War and Building Peace; Renata Dwan, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary General for Peacebuilding Support at the UN; Sally Fegan-Wyles, Director of the UN Development Group Office; Jean-Marie Guehenno, former Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations; Ameerah Haq, Deputy representative for the Secretary General in Sudan; Joao Howana, the UN’s Director for Africa; Prof. Simon Johnson, of MIT, former Assistant Director for Research at the IMF; Atul Khare, Head of the UN Mission in Timor-Leste; Richard Konteh, Deputy Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone; Dumisani Kumalo, Permanent Representative of South Africa at the UN; Jane Holl Lute, Assistant Secretary General for Peacebuilding Support; Youseff Mahmoud, Head of the UN’s Office in Burundi; Toga McIntosh, former Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs in Liberia; Alistair McKechnie, Director of Fragile and Conflicted Affected Countries at the World Bank; Chetan Kumar, Senior Conflict Prevention Adviser at the UN Development Program; Clare Lockhart, Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness; Gert Rosenthal, former Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean; Jordan Ryan, Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for Recovery and Governance in Liberia; Nicholas Shalita, former Special Adviser to the President of the 62nd General Assembly for development of the Millennium Development Goals.
Prof. Jennifer Widner, Director of the Institutions for Fragile States Initiative at Princeton, coordinated the workshop. A summary of the findings and recommendations will be prepared and used as the basis for the February workshop.