Training senior managerial personnel as a factor of Ukraine’s political subjectivity

Abstract

This article examines the political and institutional function of the system for training senior management personnel in Ukraine in the context of European integration. The article’s starting point is the thesis that, for a country seeking membership in the European Union, the training of senior management goes beyond the acquisition of universal administrative and managerial competencies. The focus is on the question: does the current system ensure the reproduction of a managerial corps capable of serving as an institutional pillar of the state’s political agency and defending its national interests? The purpose of this article is to determine whether the current system for training senior management personnel in Ukraine ensures the reproduction of a managerial elite capable of acting in the interests of the state’s political agency in the context of European integration.

The methodological foundation of the study is a combination of institutional, legal, comparative, and political-analytical approaches. An analysis was conducted of Ukrainian legislation, strategic and programmatic documents in the field of public administration reform, reports by the European Commission and OECD/SIGMA, as well as official materials from European institutions for training senior public officials. It is noted that the state’s political agency rests both on formal-legal sovereignty and on the quality of national elites, within which the managerial elite is one of the practical pillars of state capacity. It is argued that perceiving senior management personnel solely as a neutral technical apparatus narrows the understanding of their role, since it is precisely through them that institutional memory, interagency coordination, strategic policy consistency, and the representation of state interests in a multilevel European environment are ensured. It has been established that the current Ukrainian system of professional training for civil servants has a regulatory and organizational foundation but does not ensure the full-fledged reproduction of the senior management corps as a cohesive state-building stratum. Its main limitations lie in the disconnect between selection, professional training, the talent pool, career advancement, and the stability of the senior civil service, as well as in the fragmentation of training in the D4 specialty “Public Management and Administration” across numerous higher education institutions with diverse profiles. Examples from France, Poland, Italy, and Spain demonstrate that European practice maintains specialized state institutions for the selection, training, and professional development of the senior and managerial corps. It is concluded that the current system of training senior management personnel in Ukraine does not fully ensure the reproduction of the managerial elite as one of the pillars of the state’s political agency in the context of European integration. The feasibility of establishing a specialized state academy for senior management personnel as an institutional center for the formation, training, and professional renewal of the national managerial elite is substantiated.