East meets West – 32 Chinese government officials participate in government training programme

University Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kåre Bremer welcomed thirty-two individuals working in the provincial civil service at the opening ceremony on the 11th of June. Over the course of the following three weeks, the group learned about Swedish government, politics, and public administration.

“This year, we have a partial focus on the environment and sustainable development,”  says Dr. Paul T. Levin who runs the University’s Governance and Management Training programmes, “but apart from this we retain the broad character of previous programmes”.

Several departments at Stockholm University contributes lecturers to this year’s programme, including the Department of Law, the Department of Political Science, and the School of Business. The Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (SCORE) also provided teachers to the course, as did the Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Sampling Swedish culture
Speaking at the end of the programme, Dr. Levin commented that the participants from Guangdong were highly engaged in the subject matter.

“They have sampled Swedish culture, with traditional folk dancing in the archipelago and midsummer at Skansen – the latter on their own initiative. We have had a very interesting contribution by a University of Oxford lecturer about British politics and public management, several lectures about Swedish politics, government, and public administration, and guest appearances by interesting practitioners from the Swedish public sector.”

The participants have visited Riksdagen – the Swedish parliament – where former Speaker and government minister, Dr. Björn von Sydow, gave a presentation about the ideological development of the Social Democratic Party. Dr. von Sydow is also a professor of political science at Stockholm University. Also popular were site visits to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the civil servants’ worker’s union ST, and a visit to Stockholm City Hall to examine processes of public procurement and competitive tendering.

Governor of Guangdong's initiative
The initial initiative for the training programme came from the governor of Guangdong a few years ago and the first training programme was held in 2007. The training is organized by Stockholm University in collaboration with Guangdong’s Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). A month-long preparatory training session is held at SYSU, where participants learn about Chinese government and public administration as well as public management theory before travelling to Sweden.

Since 2007, Stockholm University’s GOVMAT has received requests to arrange training for other groups from China, and has completed a course for university and college presidents on the management of higher education and a course on environmentally sustainable development for mayor from different parts of China. Additional programmes are also at the planning stage.

Cooperation with University of Oxford
A new component this year is the collaboration with Oxford University, which has resulted in a guest lecture by Mr. Alan Hudson, the Director of Oxford’s Leadership Programmes for China (LPC). As part of this collaboration, Stockholm University’s Dr. Levin is set to travel to Oxford shortly to lecture on Swedish public administration and the Swedish model. These lectures as scheduled for two days of an LPC training programme for civil servants from the city of Qingao in Shandong province.

Guangdong province
Guangdong province is located on the South-East coast of China, bording Hong Kong and Macau. It is the country’s most populous province, with c:a 100 million inhabitants. It has a long tradition of openness to the outside world, and is today the country’s economic powerhouse with the highest GDP of all provinces and a third of China’s total international trade.

Governance and management training at Stockholm University

Text: Per Larsson/Paul T Levin