All Public organizations/agencies at national and sub-national levels, as well as public/private partnerships and organizations performing outsourced public service functions, are eligible for nomination. The United Nations Public Service Awards take into consideration a geographical distribution of five regions. In order to level the playing field for nominations received from countries with varying levels of development and income, the following five regions have been established:

• Africa;
• Asia and the Pacific;
• Europe and North America;
• Latin America and the Caribbean; and
• Western Asia

Nominations have to be made by another entity than the institution being nominated, i.e. self nominations will not be accepted. Eligible nominators include: Government departments and agencies; universities, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, etc.

Purely scientific innovations, e.g. in medical or environmental science, do not qualify for the United Nations Public Service Awards.

In 2011, the United Nations Public Service Awards will be given in the following five categories:

• Preventing and combating corruption in the public service
• Improving the delivery of services
• Fostering participation in policy-making decisions through innovative mechanisms
• Advancing knowledge management in government
• Promoting gender responsive delivery of public services 

The application process consists of two steps.

Selection Process in more Detail

Different Screeners/Judges assess nominations according to the process described below:

Designated DPADM experts make an initial review of the forms and accompanying documents for each nomination to ensure completeness of the nomination and supporting materials. Incomplete nominations or those that do not comply with the eligibility criteria are rejected.

Each nomination is pre-screened by DPADM experts. Each nomination is reviewed by two different experts to ensure a fair assessment of applications. A short list of nominations is established based on this pre-screening, aimed at identifying only the projects/ initiatives with potential to win the competition.

Short-listed candidates are required to provide additional documents for a second review. After another screening according to the same modalities than the first one, a second short list is established.

DPADM transmits the second short list to the Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA). A subcommittee of the CEPA is established to conduct the final selection and submit the selected award winners to the Committee for endorsement.

The Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA) is a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The Committee, which was established by ECOSOC in its resolution 2001/45, comprises twenty-four experts appointed for four years who serve in their personal capacity. The experts are nominated by the UN Secretary-General, in consultation with Member States, and approved by the Economic and Social Council. Click here for more information on CEPA.

A process of verification and validation is implemented to ascertain congruence between the nomination documents and what happens on the ground.

The CEPA submits its recommendations concerning the winning cases to the UN Secretary-General for declaration of the winners.

The winners of the awards are officially announced.

Reviewers assess each nomination according to an evaluation form designed for each category of the Award. This form features certain number of questions, and a mark is given for each question.

The United Nations Millennium Declaration emphasized the role of democratic and participatory governance in assuring the rights of men and women to “live their lives and raise their children in dignity, free from hunger and from the fear of violence, oppression, or injustice”. It also noted that good governance within each country is a prerequisite to “making development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want”.

Experience demonstrates that without good governance, nationally or internationally, and an efficient, competent, professional, responsive and highly dedicated public service, sustainable development and livelihood are jeopardized. The Secretary-General, in his speech at the World Youth Forum in 1998, stressed the importance of public service by encouraging the world’s youth to enter into this field. He said, “In this changing world of new challenges, we need, more than ever before, dedicated and talented individuals to enter public service. More than ever before, we need people like you sitting here today, to make the choice of service to humankind.”

To recruit and retain its fair share of best talent, develop innovative practices and enhance its efficiency and effectiveness, public service must be visible. Also, its guiding principles, which revolve around such objectives as public interest, eradication of poverty, equity, individual rights and working ethics, including transparency, accountability and efficiency, must be conveyed to the public.

The overall purpose of the United Nations Public Service Awards is to recognize the institutional contribution made by public servants to enhance the role, professionalism, image and visibility of the public service (Economic and Social Council decision 2000/231). It can be translated into the following more specific objectives:

(a) To reward service to citizens and motivate public servants worldwide to sustain the momentum of innovation and the improvement of the delivery of public services;

(b) To collect and disseminate successful practices and experiences in public administration in order to support efforts for improvements in country level public service delivery;

(c) Through success stories, to counterbalance any negative image of public administration, raise the image and prestige of public servants and revitalize public administration as a noble discipline on which development greatly depends;

(d) To promote, encourage and facilitate networking among institutions and organizations relevant to public administration and strengthen the networks of the United Nations programme on public administration and development; and

(e) To enhance professionalism in the public service in rewarding the successful experiences in innovations and excellence in the public service.

In brief, the Awards aim to:

• Discover innovations in governance;
• Reward excellence in the public sector;
• Motivate public servants to further promote innovation;
• Enhance professionalism in the public service;
• Raise the image of public service;
• Enhance trust in government; and
• Collect and disseminate successful practices for possible replication.

The United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution A/RES/57/277 on March 7, 2003
( | Arabic | Chinese | English | French | Russian | Spanish |), designated 23 June as the United Nations Public Service Day to “celebrate the value and virtue of service to the community”.

The Economic and Social Council established the United Nations Public Service Awards to be bestowed on the Public Service Day for contributions made to the cause of enhancing the role, prestige and visibility of public service.