The Europeanization of Public Administration teaching

Despite several decades of the Europeanization of Higher Education there is no single European model for teaching Public Administration (PA). Neither is there a single model of public administration in practice, even if European countries have been witnessing an extension of the European policy and administrative space as well as pressures for public sector convergence. Yet, this article shows that PA teaching has Europeanized in two significant ways. First, while the Europeanization of curricular content was still in its infancy 25 years ago, PA programs now project European content in their curricula. Second, and more importantly, Europeanization of PA has emerged, not as a movement to creating identikit education in PA, but as a common understanding of the quality of a discipline that remains necessarily context bound by its national, local and international dimensions. Following accepted complementary perspectives on Europeanization, the article explains the development of sustainable European PA institutions and standards for PA teaching as the result of responses to EU incentives as well as of social learning within transnational networks of European PA scholars. The article analyzes the process and results of collaborative peer-learning activities in the European scholarly community, including the Erasmus-Socrates collaborative PA networks, the European Accreditation of Public Administration Programs and the definition of a European set of PA competences that are used in PA program development and quality control. It also revisits questions of convergence and the relative Europeanization of content at the bottom-end of delivering learning outcomes, by analyzing the constitution and content of a sample of Western European PA programs that have been accredited by the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation.