The APO coordination meeting for a one-year research project on change management in the public sector commenced in Bangkok, Thailand yesterday. The three-day coordination meeting aims to review and analyze the complexities of change management in the public sector. The coordination team will also deliberate and finalize the methodology and the framework for the overall research, which will then be adopted by the national experts for the in-country research.

As part of the in-country research, each national expert will gather primary and secondary data based on the agreed methodology and parameters. While the APO has been implementing capacity-building programs for the public sector to improve overall performance and productivity, the introduction of change management has not yet been well developed to support ongoing institutional reforms of many member country governments.

In 2015, the APO conducted a workshop on change management in the public sector, and one of the recommendations by participants and experts was for the APO to collect and publish case studies since there were few publications on the subject, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. The Research on Change Management in the Public Sector is an attempt to investigate what has been done so far to introduce and manage change in the public sector and look into its complexities so that appropriate interventions can be made in formulating projects and programs in the future. The results of this study will also provide insights on how change has been introduced and managed given the complexity of the public sector.

The coordination meeting, 7-9 December 2016, is led by the chief expert Dr. Ora-orn Poocharoen,  Dean Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration Dean, Chiang Mai University and is being attended by national experts from Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.