Annual Report 2005-06.

This is a report of a somewhat unusual time period. Embracing a year and a half, it covers CPS activities
from January 2005 until July 2006. This is the result of a decision to shift in reporting from calendar to
academic year. The former was followed in the formative years of the Center for Policy Studies, mainly
due to our specific institutional biography. As we have become fully anchored in the academic life and
organizational structures of Central European University, we have decided to adjust our reporting cycle
towards the academic calendar of the University.
During the reporting period, our activities became diversified by opening new avenues of action and
institutionalizing other ones. We nurtured a new masters program in public policy with three special
tracks relying mostly on external funding. The program was transformed into an independent department
at the end of the 2005/2006 academic year. We completed a number of comparative European research
projects as consortium partners and are running another one in the field of post-socialist economic
culture as a coordinator of the consortium. Our researchers helped to form new networks to investigate
policy issues in which attention is still relatively modest (e.g. public integrity and rural development). We
continued to work with smaller and bigger transnational organizations to address issues of the day with
the aim of building teaching resources, test the validity of policy paradigms, and introduce self-reflexive
inquiries into the practice of major policy making institutions (such as the World Bank). We continued to
build up our on-line electronic library of policy papers and analysis for and from researchers dealing with
the problems of post-socialist transformations.
We applied different strategies to better connect our main institutional partners and circles of clients
and supporters. We continued to liaise with the Open Society Institute, most notably, by providing
support to the International Policy Fellowship Program in knowledge management and dissemination,
helping the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative shape pilot policy actions in a
distinctive policy area, and assisting the Network Women’s Program in training Roma women leaders in
their policy analysis and advocacy skills. We participated in the formation of an association of young
independent think tanks in the region, and shared our resources with other established ones.