Towards Relational Public Services conference. Call for Abstracts: deadline Jan 31st 2023
Venue: Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 14/15 June 2023 (SAVE THE DATE)Website: Complexity Outcomes Conference
This conference seeks to tackle a problem animating policymakers, service professionals and academics alike: in an increasingly complex world, how can public services and social interventions create and sustain positive lives for the people and populations they serve? There is increasing pressure for a radical change in the form and function of public administration, management and governance. Genuine social change - to deliver high-level conditions of societal wellbeing like quality-of-life, health, criminal behaviour or educational attainment or responses to climate change or energy shortages - are simply too complex to be delivered by top-down policymaking, target-driven management and contractualism, or more rigorously-evidenced social interventions. Human and relational services are better achieved and value better created by investing in the capability of public service systems and to engage meaningfully with the complexity of people's lives and the communities they live in.
Relational approaches to public services raises questions such as:
- What are key issues affecting relationships that produce outcomes?
- How can new methods such as Human Learning Systems and Learning Partnering recognize and ameliorate problems in relationships?
- What and how can we learn and innovate whether from success or failure?Are there innovative ways approaching the designing/re-designing of organisations and collaborations to support improvements in outcomes?
- What are the appropriate roles for measuring and measurement in responding to the challenges of relational public services?
- What role do information systems and data have in supporting the development of relational approaches?
- How do stakeholders innovate their relation and relationships in specific contexts, and with what effect?
- What role does public engagement and deliberation have in the innovation of public services and new forms of relations between governance, management and delivery of public services?
- What role do Social Enterprises and the wider VCS have in offering ways and means to reforming public services?
- What are the role of institutions such as Universities in supporting innovations, brokering partnerships or learning in relationships (as engaged scholars) in areas as diverse as the co-production of the care of older people, community development to responses to climate change?
Further details can be accessed via the Complexity Outcomes Conference website.