“Training senior civil servants alone is not enough to lead the ecological transition”

2023-05-11 09:00:07

Lhe government announced, on October 11, 2022, a training plan for senior civil servants in the ecological transition, with the aim of training 25,000 of them by 2024, before generalizing it to the whole civil servants, all public functions combined, by 2027. Training began, following on from a “pilot” module, reserved for the State civil service, namely 220 central administration directors.

The association A public service for ecological transition welcomes this first initiative. However, it identifies both quantitative and qualitative obstacles that could delay or even undermine the generalization desired by the government. Training senior civil servants alone is not enough to lead the ecological transition. It is essential to reach a critical mass of trained agents to facilitate the implementation of the numerous sectoral strategies and policies that already exist.

Moreover, the government’s approach is part of a tradition ” from high to low “of “center to the territories”, very French. The government, aware of these limits, has chosen to launch a training experiment on a regional scale, in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Such a decision is a step in the right direction. The regional level will not only make it possible to reach more agents, but also to make the training more concrete and action-oriented, since it takes into account the geographical, climatic, institutional and socio-economic specificities of the territories concerned.

An opportunity to strengthen the collaboration of public actors

A more decentralized approach, open to the three public functions rather than reserved for the State, seems essential. The regional version currently envisaged seems insufficient to engage the territories in systemic changes that require dialogue and concerted progress between public actors in the same area. We suggest considering joint and mixed training from the outset.

Authors Henri Bergeron, Olivier Borraz, Patrick Castel, François Dedieu de Covid-19; an organizational crisis highlighted that the territories that have been most successful in managing the pandemic are those that already had experience of multi-stakeholder approaches and collaboration between structures. Overcoming the silo approach so common in our country will save time and efficiency, and avoid blockages and errors.

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