His Excellency Dr. Raed Mohammed Bin Shams, Director General of the Bahrain Institute of Public Administration, reasserted the necessity of endorsement of research and stimulation of communication for the development and building of confidence in the government services, policies and operations, while rigorously advocating the fact that research take precedence in an advance and preparatory stage before any strategic planning process and that media is an important tool for communication from the beginning of planning to the execution stage, measurement of the feedback so that the government services and policies may earn their right to confidence acquirement and building of full awareness from the various classes, be it the government system, the private sector and the citizen.
Dr. Bin Shams stated, during the roundtable gathering which was organized by the Institute in the presence of 11 undersecretaries and assistant undersecretaries from the various government establishments and organizations, that trust in the government operations is an exchange process and is divided into various levels that begins internally at an institutional level and moves on to another level representing trust intergovernmental trust between the government organizations in the public sector and then trust between the private and public sectors. On the other hand, the trust where the citizen is a party to assume other dimensions that reaches trust in the impact of the public performance, the efficacy of government decisions and policies, their feasibility and importance in the light of on-going global changes and shifts.
On the other hand, Professor Geert Bouckaert, President of the International Institute for Administrative Sciences (IIAS), addressed in his presentation a number of issues which evolve around a number of concerns which focus on the need of decision makers in the public sector for the trust of the citizens, the key components for building, earning and keeping such trust, the impact of “satisfaction” on building and acquiring the trust, monitoring the gap between aspirations and expectations, types of trust that are appropriate for government policies, the required solutions, methodologies and strategies for treatment of the issues of trust and the role of the private and public sectors in building and maintaining confidence and trust.
It is worthy of note that the Bahrain Institute of Public Administration (BIPA) organized the roundtable event under the slogan “Building and Promoting Trust in Government Services, Polices and Operations” with a view to exchanging the best practices and formulating recommendations for effective and amenable government policies capable of realization of the expectations of the citizens in line with the directives of the political leadership.