UKPAC PRIZE COMPETITION 2006: JUDGES’ REPORT

The Prospectus for the 2006 competition read, in part, as follows:

A prize will be awarded for an outstanding article or chapter in the field of public administration or public management that has been published recently in a professional or an academic journal, or in an anthology.
This year’s prize will be reimbursement of the costs (capped at £1,000) of attending any annual conference of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) or European Group of Public Administration (EGPA), up to the end of 2007.
The winner will also be awarded the UKPAC prize medal and certificate and a two year subscription to the International Review of Administrative Sciences.
In addition, for academic entrants (staff or postgraduate students), book tokens to the value of £300 may be awarded to the winner’s employing university/college or department.

Although there is no age limit, the competition is intended to encourage the participation of relatively young or new academics and practitioners in the work of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) and its affiliate bodies; it is open to any UK citizen or to anyone employed or resident in the UK at the time that the winning entry was published.

The judges will be looking for published work in any field of public administration or public management that makes a particularly important and original contribution to theory and/or practice in these fields. Contributions from cognate disciplines (such as public law, organisational psychology or sociology) will be eligible for consideration.

The closing date for submission is 16 June 2006, and this deadline will be strictly enforced.

Only three entries were received – a disappointing outcome, and a decline even on last year’s modest figure of five. All three were articles that had been published in academic journals and all of them satisfied the eligibility rules of the competition. One entry was multi-authored, the other two were single authored.

We are glad to report that the smallness of the entry was offset by the high quality of the submissions. The judges agreed that all three entries were of very good academic quality and were serious contenders for an award. Indeed, the task of choosing between them proved to be difficult. In the end, however, we agreed, unanimously that one of the entries merited a clear first place ahead of the other two and we recommend, therefore, that the 2006 UKPAC Prize be awarded to:

Chris Skelcher, Navdeep Mathur and Mike Smith, 'The Public Governance of Collaborative Space: Discourse, Design and Democracy', Public Administration 83(3), 2005, pp. 573-596.

This article is based on a theoretically-informed and multi-disciplinary empirical study of 26 partnership boards in two English municipal authorities, investigating ‘the extent to which democratic practices are integral to the design of governmental institutions operating in collaborative spaces.’ The judges were impressed by the breadth and depth of the theoretical perspectives employed, by the methodological sophistication of the research design (which will be potentially useful to other researchers) and by the clarity with which difficult ideas and concepts were explained and presented. They felt that the article offered insights and conclusions that would be of interest to practitioners as well as to academics.

The judges further recommend that book tokens to the value of £300 be awarded to the nominating institution, the School of Public Policy, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.



Gavin Drewry (Convenor)
Andrew Massey
Margaret Saner
November 2006