Past Program

The ability of government to carry out its role effectively in a world of increasingly complex challenges is under pressure.  In the face of shifting public expectations, political unrest and budget cuts, civil servants require new networks, skills, knowledge and strategic foresight.

The Public Sector Strategy Network builds a supportive alliance of engaged senior public servants and connects them with cross-sectoral innovators.  Facilitating the exchange of ideas, connections and knowledge, the Network is designed as a dynamic platform for outstanding leaders in public sector strategy to take advantage of new opportunities and be best prepared for future challenges.  

The Network’s keystone event is its invitation-only Annual Foresight Retreat, critical for developing future partnerships, fostering new relationships, and accelerating innovation.  The Retreat’s agenda each year is directly tailored to participants’ interests and inputs.  Members can pool their insights and tap into each others’ expertise, ensuring that in-person meetings can be deeper and more reflective.

The Network also offers additional exclusive opportunities for participating members, countries, and institutions to engage with each other and have informal exchanges on key topics throughout the year.  Network membership enables participants to shape the meeting agenda to generate impact for individuals, institutions, and ideas.  Government representatives already active in the Network have benefited from sharing cross-border experience to expand their knowledge base to better implement domestic agendas. 

The Office of Strategic Affairs in the Abu Dhabi government launched the initiative in 2010 with a series of annual workshops and roundtables to develop relationships across the international strategic policy community.  The decision to create a year-round Public Sector Strategy Network came in 2017.  Salzburg Global Seminar serves as the Network’s politically and geographically independent convener, in partnership with Apolitical.  

The Annual Foresight Retreat is curated as a highly-interactive roundtable harnessing many years’ experience of conference design best practice.  Discussions take place in plenary as well as in small breakout groups in order to take deep dives on the issues.  Specific case studies build on the experience of participants.

The Annual Retreat is fully residential, with all accommodations and meals on site at Salzburg Global Seminar’s headquarters in Schloss Leopoldskron, in Salzburg, Austria.  This historic venue – a rococo palace built for an archbishop-prince, later home to Salzburg Festival founder Max Reinhardt, backdrop for the movie The Sound of Music, and now an award-winning hotel – provides an inspiring setting for rest, renewal, and perspective-taking.  Adherence to the Chatham House Rule ensures an open and free exchange among peers in privacy, trust, and openness.

This year’s retreat, the first to take place in person since the pandemic, will include short presentations about challenges and questions facing participants’ countries, leading to a strategy discussion about what is or is not working, how it relates to building trust; what the government’s role is or should be (and what are the roles of non-state actors); and what the future holds on a range of critical topics.

The Annual Foresight Retreat has four goals:

1. Facilitate active ongoing peer-to-peer learning under the values of trust and open exchange, sharing best practices and lessons learned from system failure and recovery;
2. Help senior leaders and rising talents in government reimagine the design, delivery and funding of core services and develop more effective partnerships and communication with citizens, civil society and business;
3. Support “intrapreneurship” within public sector culture and recruitment through new ways to redeploy, reskill, and reorganize people and operations; and
4. Optimize cross-sector government innovation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The program will bring together a group of no more than 30 participants.  We prioritize participants from small and mid-sized countries on the forefront of strategic foresight and innovation.  Participants will include:

• Current ministers, cabinet secretaries, similar ranking senior officials or rising stars from priority countries recognized as leaders in public sector innovation;
• Disruptors and resource experts at the leading edge of technology, finance, communications, behavioral science, academia, philanthropy, and civil society;
• Senior leaders from dynamic sub-national governments at the provincial or city level, including from larger countries, which have excelled as incubators of sub-state approaches to governance; and
• Network multipliers, representing top public service training institutions/networks, academia, and think-tanks.