GOOD PRACTICES AND INNOVATIONS IN PUBLIC GOVERNANCE
Deepening democracy to provide opportunities not only for improved representation but also for more active participation and engagement in public affairs requires innovative institutional mechanisms, processes, and policies. As a consequence, several countries around the world are attempting to revitalize their public administration and make it more proactive, more efficient, more accountable, and especially more service oriented. To accomplish this transformation, governments are introducing innovations in their organisational structure, practices, capacities, and working on how to mobilize, deploy, and utilize the human, material, information, technological, and financial resources for service delivery to remote, disadvantaged, and challenged people. While there are efforts all over the world to find innovative ways to improve the performance of public administration and to empower it to effectively initiate, plan and implement national development policies and programmes as well as international and regional agreed development strategies, including the Millennium Development Goals; there is, also, a strong need to acknowledge and share them at the international level. In light of the above, the United Nations Public Service Awards Programme was launched to promote and support Member States’ efforts to improve public sector performance. The importance of this international recognition has later been recalled in 2005, when the United Nations General Assembly “agreed that the United Nations should promote innovation in government and public administration and stressed the importance of making more effective use of United Nations Public Service Day and the United Nations Public Service Awards in the process of revitalizing public administration by building a culture of innovation, partnership, and responsiveness� (UN/2005, A/60/L.24, para.7). To capitalize on existing knowledge on how to achieve development and the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 also recommended in Resolution 57/277 that the exchange of experiences related to the role of public administration in the implementation of internationally agreed goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration, be encouraged (United Nations, 2003, A/RES/57/277).
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