ETHICS RULES AND THE NEED FOR TRAINING OF HOLDERS OF PUBLIC OFFICE (HPOs)

As the number of ethics rules and standards increase, holders of public office must be made aware of the rules adopted. While adopting new rules and standards is a key element to any successful ethics regime, holders of public office also need to be educated with regard to those rules. Training is an important instrument in any strategy to increase awareness of the existence of rules and standards. However, ‘one-stop training’ is not enough either. The effective implementation of a conflicts of interest policy requires the ongoing education of all holders of public office. Clearly, one important challenge is to convince ministers, legislators, judges and directors to take the necessary time and to participate in training courses. Another challenge is to convince holders of public office of the need for training.

Training programmes in ethics and conflicts of interest should be offered for every institution and for every category of public office holders. Training programmes and teaching courses can increase awareness and give realistic and practical descriptions of the circumstances and relationships that can lead to conflicts of interest. This is particularly important for holders of public office in both Government and Parliament who face rapidly-changing new developments and many different delicate situations in different dossiers and situations such as subsidy policies, private-public partnerships, relations with NGOs, the interchange and personal contacts with lobbyists, voters, political parties, the media etc.

Ideally, an holder of public office should not only be trained in ethics, but also have (at any time) access to organisational support, guidelines, advice and other information that will help him/her to identify and disclose a conflict of interest. In addition, those who attend training days should not just be those who are interested in these subjects, anyway or those who are involved in ethics management issues.  

It is reasonable to conclude that a competency based approach to ethics regulation which takes into account the centrality of democratic principles, as much as informed, critical, responsible, and accountable judgment - notions which already underpin the concept of ‘professionalism’ - can enable public officials to function effectively, ethically speaking, when faced with ethically problematic situations.

The key elements of such competence include:

1. Subject-matter knowledge: the substantive institutional ethics standards, both de facto and de jure standards of ethical official conduct and integrity standards, together with the legal, institutional, political, and cultural justifications for those standards;
2. Reasoning skills: the diagnostic and analytic skills needed to identify (‘construct’) an ethically problematic situation, and the skills of values-clarification and values-based reasoning needed to apply relevant standards appropriately, to identify and test assumptions, and to recognise where a case is not covered by a particular rule or where further information is required in order to understand the matter at issue;
3. Problem-solving skills: the skills needed to resolve an issue where competing and conflicting goods contend for attention: demands of ethical or moral principle, the law, the organisation’s policy, standards, and guidelines, ‘the public interest’, and the particular citizens’ interests, (etc.) all have to be considered. This requires a ‘systems’ thinking’ approach to the recognition of the long-term consequences of a proposed resolution of the issue in each of these domains;
4. Advocacy skills: the ability to advocate effectively a principled view of the matter, and the proposed or actual decision. This activity is necessarily undertaken with different audiences, such as Ministers, media, civil servants, review tribunals, and the public at large, and so relies on specific conceptual, language, and argumentation skills;
5. Self-awareness and consensus-building skills: ‘Doing Ethics’ is fundamentally a social activity, involving the legitimate rights and interest of others, (including the State). Officials need to develop skills in recognizing the various merits and weaknesses of their own positions, and of the principled positions which may be taken by other officials, individuals, interest groups, and the State, and building consensus;
6. Attitude and Commitment: not normally regarded as a skill, but perhaps the most problematic area of developmental intervention is achieving the development of the attitudes or commitments needed for ensuring reliable application of standards. Training and knowledge does not of itself guarantee conforming conduct: ethically competent public officials may choose to ignore ethics considerations, even duties, in performing their functions, especially when unobserved.

Competence-Based Training in professional ethics among officials seeks to promote development of rational commitment to appropriate norms and standards, through the use of reflective learning. It is not greatly surprising, given this background, that ‘professional ethics for public administration practitioners’ still gives the appearance of being fraught with difficulty, such that the minimalist position adopted by many a public organisation is requiring that employed officials certify that they have read the relevant Code of Ethics, understand the basics of Conflict of Interest, and have enough familiarity with the law and established policy and procedures to keep themselves and their institutions out of trouble: an exercise in prospective blame-shifting. Professional Ethics for public officials remains ‘a bridge too far’.