P08 SIG The Practice Panel
Coalescing Around Partnerships Across the Boundaries of Practice and the Academy: Building on Experience in Challenging Times
Panel Chairs
Corresponding Chair
- Christine Flynn, FAICD, Australian Institute of Company Director: christine.flynn@bigpond.com
Review Group Chair
- Professor John Diamond, Emeritus Professor at Edgehill University, UK.
- Professor Robert Shepherd, Carleton University, Canada.
Call for Abstracts
The theme of the 2027 Conference underlines the importance of our understanding and critically reflecting on the ways in which public administration institutions, academics and practitioners have the capacity and space to respond to the ‘Grand Challenges’ we all face. The very nature of these current challenges, problems and uncertainties is that they are built on decades of separation or ambivalence between academics themselves (a lack of intra institutional co-operation and collaboration) coupled with how to engage with public management practice. There is a growing realization that such separations are no longer sustainable, given various changes in power and institutional structures, partly linked to the global crises following 2008 and the current global geopolitical uncertainties and societal polarisation (shifts in US economic and foreign policy, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as well the Climate Emergency, as well as national crises). Academics and practitioners have become active participants in finding solutions to societal problems extending from voids in public institutional authorities and leadership. Academics and practitioners have been forwarding ideas for new systems and processes, as well as a common language to tackle these challenges together that also includes public organizations as participants rather than as sole leaders or as bystanders. The very assumptions upon which our public institutions are built requires adjustment in order to challenge institutional orthodoxy that may no longer hold. This conference invites us to challenge conventional wisdoms and to re-imagine what working across those intellectual, professional, and organisational divides might entail.
The Practice Panel welcomes contributions from researchers and practitioners working in these spaces as well those with a role in supporting and promoting such work. We are acutely aware that such work is not always straightforward and is often highly dependent on sustaining relationships of trust and integrity. We are aware that such relationships necessitate support and guidance for those just starting out as well as those who are experienced. There is an obligation to include the wisdom and insights of newer generations that challenge conventional institutional approaches. We want to develop our shared understanding of what the processes to sustain such an approach might entail. We will be facilitating the dialogues within the panel informed by the Outcomes Pathway approach we developed in 2025 at the IRSPM Bologna Conference, and which was refined in 2026 in Perth.
This Call for Abstracts welcomes contributions from those doctoral students or early career researchers who are engaged with working across the boundaries of scholarship and practice as well as those based in federal/national, provincial/state or municipal institutions who are committed to working with the academy. We especially welcome proposals from those municipal officials and leaders who are engaged with questions in this panel drawing on their professional skills, knowledge and experience and their expertise of engaging uncertainty.
We invite proposals that seek to promote the maximum dialogue and opportunities for learning and engagement. In a very real sense, the Practice Panel would like participants to regard the opportunity to participate as building and sustaining the social capital of us as individuals as well as a group within the IRSPM networks.
