Public management is often associated with the notion of proximity. Local public services, local police, local courts, local hospitals, local agents... there is a wide range of expressions of public policy and public action that refer to proximity, which is widely discussed in terms of spatial distance. For several years now, public management has been investing in the other dimensions of proximity as presented in the work of the eponymous school (Boschma, 2005; Torre and Rallet, 2005; Talbot, 2008). In France, this has been built up in the mid-1990s, with the primary objective of integrating the role of space in analysis. It is based on a renewed conception of space, which is no longer understood simply as a generator of costs, but also as a provider of resources. To do this, it deploys an analytical grid, a "grammar", that shows what connects the actors (Torre and Talbot, 2018). The in-depth transformations that public organizations are undergoing can be read from this grammar, such as the appearance of new distances, the alteration of proximities, or perhaps even in a resilience movement, the creation of new forms of proximities that, once articulated, found territories.
The spatial dimension of proximity remains more relevant than ever in the public domain. The disconnection between metropolitan areas and peri-urban and rural areas questions how to offer public services as close as possible to the citizens who need them What levers and solutions are emerging to maintain proximity? How does the supply of public services fit into the territory? Does territorial management integrate the positive and negative effects of proximity? Faced with a trend to rationalize public services, can territories maintain proximity?
In these non-spatial dimensions, the question of cognitive proximity is particularly questioned with the diffusion of semantics and practices coming from the New Public Management (NPM) trend, in which operators are struggling to find new markers. Through its capacity to bring back to the forefront the interactions between stakeholders, does proximity allow us to go beyond the NPM thesis? How do the various stakeholders understand the terms “efficiency” and “performance”? Does cognitive proximity, through its effects on interactions, lead to performance and efficiency of the public service? How do stakeholders appropriate tools and languages that belong or belonged to another universe than that of the public sector? How is a (new) cognitive proximity constructed?
The public service culture is based on strong common values embodied by its agents. The research stream on public ethics, or the older stream of research on public service motivations, is called on more than ever to read the phenomena of de-motivation and exhaustion of public employees. Does this point to a growing institutional distance and a difficulty in maintaining institutional proximity and a foundation of shared values? How does the notion of institutional proximity renew the reading of public values or, more generally, the reading of public service culture? Can we talk about public values or "publicitude" (Bozeman, 2007) in relation to a territory? What links can be established between the notions of territories, proximity and the emergence of the theory of new public value (PVM) (Moore, 2013) or the public value perspective (PVP) (Bozeman et al., 2017)?
Reorganizations between public structures/entities and administrative services (mergers, regroupings) and public/private partnerships deserve more reinvestment in the field of organizational proximity or distance. How is proximity to users transformed between professional bodies? What forms of proximity exist or are to be developed in this territory? What are, through the prism of proximity, the territorial organizations of the future?
Finally, in its social dimension, proximity refers very directly to the management of public services. Indeed, how can we imagine a public service without social ties, interactions or even social affinities that are supposed to form the bases of trust between actors (Granovetter, 1985)? Consequently, the problem of the territorialisation of public management can find an original answer in a proximist reading. What types of territories favour social interactions and trust in public service? Do digital tools bring us closer to or further away from public services?
Through the various forms proximity can take, all the links between the territory and public management can be questioned, analysed and even rethought. Each of the major fields of intervention of public management in territories (education, health, social services, university, local authorities, justice, security, culture, employment ...) can be described in terms of proximity between actors and stakeholders in its fields. It is also this challenge that this call for papers aims to meet by enabling practitioners, researchers, doctoral students and citizens in their respective fields to reflect on the place that proximity or proximities take in the daily practices of public management. For example, how does proximity or proximities express itself or themselves in the health sector? What does the health crisis of Covid-19 modify in the expression or research of proximity in public management in the territories? What does proximity represent in the public management of a university, a high school, a school? Which places occupy the proximity in fields as different and close at the same time as security, culture or social services? More generally, how can proximity enable us to establish links between these different fields, for example in the management of a local authority or in decentralized public policies at the level of a territory?
Moreover, proximity offers public management an access to more distant horizons by allowing a dialogue between local, regional, national and international territories, rather than concentrating it in a closed spatial area. It is also in the analysis and description of the forms taken by these dialogues that we encourage future contributors to think, particularly by taking into account the temporary dimensions of proximity (Torre, 2009) that digital and artificial intelligence technologies, for example, allow.
These are some of the questions raised by proximity, which constitute a major challenge for public management, and which we are including in the AIRMAP 2021 conference in Clermont-Ferrand.
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