This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. This book would not have been possible without the amazing and quite unforeseen support of a great number of institutions and individuals. We are first of all both extremely grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the generous funding of this project through the Anneliese Maier Research Award, which allowed us to pursue unconventional questions and use even more unconventional ways to develop our agenda.
Only a highly unusual and flexible research grant like this could make a project like this possible. The quite impressive prize money, lasting for five years, stipulated that it should be used to strengthen Public Administration Teaching and Research in Germany, and that it should be undertaken in cooperation with a German university, but otherwise there were no strings attached.
Geert Bouckaert choose the University of Potsdam and Werner Jann as his partners, and both of us decided that the money should be used not just for Germany, but for Public Administration in Europe in general. We are particularly grateful to the more than participants of our four thematic seminars and the final conference at the University of Lausanne, which provided the necessary inspirations, debates and vital support for our project.
They all supported and encouraged this visionary project. Last not least, we want to thank the contributors to this volume for their flexibility and willingness to answer our call for short, topical or even provocative essays, outside the usual academic comfort zone.
The team at Leuven University Press did a great job in preparing this publication. We are particularly grateful for the enthusiasm and support of the entire EGPA steering committee and its executive secretary Fabienne Maron.
