Future of Public Service - Program Strategy Meeting

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Future of Public Service - Program Strategy Meeting

Strategy meeting convenes to discuss how public services will change dramatically and how we should react to, and plan for, these upheavals

New technologies, societal and demographic transformation, unprecedented human mobility, and other accelerating trends will render the familiar public services of today unrecognizable by 2050. Cities, on the frontline of social, economic and environmental pressures, already point the way to renewal as they forge new alliances with each other and with non-state actors. The “Future of Public Service: Program Strategy Meeting”, taking place October 3 to 5 at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria, will convene 22 experts from 10 different countries to identify and address challenges and opportunities that the public services will face as they undergo rapid and drastic change, in order to design a new ten-year initiative: The “Salzburg Global Forum on the Future of Public Service”.

The Future of Public Service: Program Strategy Meeting, held in partnership with the Arizona State University, aims to establish the international network of partner institutions and experts, prioritize long-term focal areas and questions, establish shorter term questions for sessions taking place in 2017-19, and determine criteria for selecting future session participants.  Importantly, the session will begin the process of rapid development of a city hub network. It will provide the foundation for the Salzburg Global Forum on the Future of Public Services, to launch in 2017.

By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will live in cities.  At a time of tightening public budgets, change will increasingly be shaped by urban administrations and non-government community stakeholders.  The globalizing world will also require increasingly broad connections across traditional boundaries. The multi-year Forum will advance change by connecting selected cities as well as sector partners with specific skills and experiences to advance jointly-agreed program goals.  The Forum will work with a limited number of diverse city hubs, in order to lead the way in public service innovation, and focus on a long-term interactive collaborative network.  Over the coming years, participants from the selected city hubs will provide an exceptional cross-sector resource for others in their home cities, their countries, and trans-national networks. These city hubs will provide a platform of innovative individuals and committed networks that will pioneer the ideas generated at the Salzburg Global Forum on the Future of Public Service.

This multi-year series will unite leading institutional changemakers from the public, private, and civil society sectors in order to support public service leadership and socially-meaningful innovation for the future. The Forum aims to redefine the locus of effective public service, looking across various sectors, institutions and geographies, with a special focus on the relationship of “megapolitan” regions to wider nation states and multilateral organizations.  The Forum will help partner institutions and participants look beyond incremental change to anticipate radical shifts and take full advantage of the opportunities they present.

“We want to go beyond ideology and look at the methodology of public service, in a world which is increasingly both more global and more local” explains program director Charles Ehrlich, “we are not looking at ‘best practices’ for today, but rather what the best practices will need to be in 2050 and how do we test and prepare now so we are ready for the future.”


The Salzburg Global Session Future of Public Service: Program Strategy Meeting is part of the multi-year series Salzburg Global Forum on the Future of Public Service. The series is being hosted in partnership with Arizona State University. More information on the session can be found here: http://www.salzburgglobal.org/go/568