The national school of public administration in greece: A preliminary comparative study

This preliminary study seeks to identify some of the factors responsible for the hitherto limited success of the National School of Public Administration in Greece, which became operational in 1985. The School, modeled after the National School of Public Administration (ENA) in France, annually accepts into its four specialized tracks with their common core curriculum both civil servants and private citizens who succeed in its rigorous entrance competitions. The School represents an effort to identify administrative talent and offer specialized training in public administration toward upgrading the administrative capabilities of the Greek civil service. Some tentative conclusions point out that the limited success of the School is associated with its brief life span, its only partial acceptance by the unions of higher civil servants, its relatively legalistic program orientation, its inadequate emphasis on internships or learning by doing, the non-strategic placement of graduates, and the absence of an identifiable corps of administrative generalists readily transferable from department to department. Perhaps, the foremost constraining factors are to be found in the areas of limited resources, brief periods of experimentation, and limited adaptation of a French prototype to the current realities of the Greek civil service.