IS ENAP EFFECTIVE? AN INSTITUTIONAL ASSESSMENT OF THE NATIONAL SCHOOL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Assessment; institutions; government school; ENAP.
The field of institutional assessment occupies an unprivileged position in the Social Sciences, since evaluative researches have often focused on the assessment of policies/programs. The assessment of public institutions in a wider sense has achieved some recognition only in the educational literature, and to some degree in organizational studies. An issue with the former would be that it, due to its own nature, reflects upon a specific model of institution (the university), whereas the latter, despite including a wider range of institution types, have adopted an essentially managerialist approach. This thesis deals with the challenge of assessing, with the use of the theoretical and methodological tools involved in the evaluation of policies and institutions (especially educational ones), the Escola Nacional de Administração Pública (ENAP), a Escola de Governo (literally “government school”) whose official goal is to train the upper echelons of the country’s public bureaucracy. To accomplish this, institutional dimensions—organizational characteristics, administrative management, material conditions, human resources, and educational dimension—were created, and questions relating to each of them were posed and answered.