Greater accountability is needed to achieve more inclusive growth in developing Asia-Pacific countries. Despite being able to achieve economic growth, a high degree of inequality constrains the impact growth can have on reducing poverty and achieve desirable development outcomes. High levels of gross inequalities can also undermine social cohesion and stability. Making growth more inclusive requires greater accountability of public institutions as poor public sector management does undermine economic growth as well as make inclusion out of reach. A range of initiatives involving increased accountability in all level of governments’ activities should be supported. Policy implications on the improvement of accountability across the region are needed for governments to use as a tool to achieve inclusive growth.

This sub-theme will focus on the following areas:

• Open and inclusive governance
• Decentralization and local governance
• Polycentric governance
• Upward and downward accountability of public organization
• Governance networks in the public sector
• Social capital and institutional trust
• Public-private-society partnerships

Better stakeholder engagement both within and outside public sector can help ensure that policies to promote inclusive growth are the right ones and are implemented efficiently and successfully. There can be many economic and social benefits to be gained from effectively engaging stakeholders as policies are more coherent and more synergy among projects can be expected. Greater acceptance as well as public trust can also be gained from more engagement of stakeholders. Public administration solutions are crucial to promote engagement of all stakeholders at all level of public policy making in order to ensure that policies to promote economic growth is inclusive. Several issues concerning the role of public sector to support stake holder engagement for inclusive policy making should be addressed critically and received well attention from policy makers across the region.
The sub-theme will focus on the following areas.

• Redistribution policies
• Policy implementation and evaluation
• Project management
• Citizen engagement in public service delivery
• Citizen engagement and poverty eradication
• Participatory budgeting and auditing
• Social innovation
• Co-production and co-creation
• Sustainability performance in public organizations

The digital transformation is rapidly changing service delivery practices. New and more demand of public services are expected from citizens. The shift from reactive to proactive service delivery mechanisms, enabled by a transition from e-government to digital government, offers the chance to better respond to user demand. Governments across the region need to mobilize a more effective response to widening inequality and stagnating median income as technological change and globalization have gathered force. Public data is a powerful asset to move from citizen-centred to citizen-driven approaches, allowing governments to better design and tailor public service delivery processes.

• Digital government for inclusive development
• Public service Innovation
• Digital transformation in public sector
• Social Media and Inclusive growth
• Digital welfare
• Cloud computing services for government
• Digital technology as a tool for inclusive development
• Smart city management
• Artificial intelligence in public service delivery
• Transparent government through information disclosure
• Inter-organizational information sharing
• Making service delivery inclusive with the use of Big Data

Across the globe, public sector has seen a sharp expansion in the amount of activity devoted to improving government performance. It is important to ensure that any government activities can produces the highest possible outputs in order to meet citizens’ expectation and hence lead to desirable development outcomes. One important tool to achieve higher performance in public sector is through employee engagement. Civil service operations nowadays are considered to in the very challenging times especially as they are faced with higher citizen expectations, yet, they have fewer resources. It is crucial for public sector administrators to find mechanisms that lead to stronger and more efficient employee engagement in order to achieve higher productivity and better performance at all levels.

This sub-theme addresses the question of how to improve public sector performance through employee engagement in the following issues.

• Integrated human resource management strategies
• Performance management reform
• Policies in human resource development
• Maintaining employee engagement and motivation
• Building social and ethical capital in public sector organizations
• Participatory monitoring and evaluation
• Employee performance and public service improvement