Introduction: The Past and the Future of a Community at the Heart of the Administrative Sciences

Abstract

The chapter argues that there are functional, cultural and institutional reasons that underpin the significance of a regional group for public administration (PA), like EGPA—the European Group for Public Administration. The chapter delves into the continued and even stronger today than ever rationale for establishing a platform for researching and studying PA at an ‘intermediate level of governance’ between the national and the global levels. The argument worked out in this chapter represents a common thread throughout the book, where the various chapters point at different facets of this underlying major claim and provide further evidence for it. The chapter then concludes with an overview of the book Public Administration in Europe: The Contribution of EGPA.