HOW TO DEVELOP SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFORMS.

• Author: Radu, Liviu

1. Public administration reform--a brief overview

   Public administration reform is a topic that is subject to extensive debates since the last decades of the previous century when reforms became almost a fashion (Kickert, 1997, p. 8). In the last seven years, the subject became as actual as possible because of the economic crisis (or recession; this is another subject for debates: crisis or recession; but exceeds the topic of this paper). The recent recession renewed some of the questions related to reforms that were raised in late 1990s and in the first years of the new millennium. Should we have more or less state interference in the economy (markets collapsed due to the lack of state intervention)? Is New Public Management (NPM) a successful approach for public administration? Or, can we speak about NPM as an approach that is (or was) generally accepted and promoted as a public policy at wide scale? (To my opinion, NPM has among its principles some that are undermining it as a general policy: principles like decentralization, devolution or delegation are conflicting with the idea of promoting these very principles at a general scale.) Or, how can we make governance mechanisms effective? Or, is neo-weberianism something really new or it is the same old lady with some new hat? (Hood, 1991; Kickert, 1997; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).

   Reforms were as diverse as the number of countries that undertook them. However, we may identify a number of fields that were subjects of such measures. Since the topic of this paper is not the extensive analysis of the administrative processes worldwide I will present only a brief summary of the excellent work of Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011).

   1. Being triggered by financial problems that most of the Western countries encountered in the 1980s and then in 2008, financial management was one of the primary targets of the reforms. First, budgeting '... became more intimately linked with other processes--planning, operational management and performance management' (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 78). Changes were also made in accounting methods and techniques, and in auditing. Concerning the latter, many voices were accusing the 'Audit Explosion', that is the excessive use of auditing and other means of control, as Mike Power named one of his works (Pollitt, 2003, p. 47).

   2. Another subject of reforms was human resource management. Topics as recruitment, promotion, motivation or career system were addressed from different perspectives and approaches. Many Western countries undertook drastic measures to reduce the costs for the functioning of the public bureaucracies: 'The Global Economic Crisis of 2008 ushered in hard times for many civil servants in many states. Salaries were frozen or cut in most of our twelve countries, numbers were drastically reduced in several, and pension rights were reduced in various ways.' (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 89). But measures were taken also for making the public service more efficient, effective and flexible. Demke and Moilanen apud Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011, p. 90) identified a number of 'widespread trajectories' of human resource management:

      --'A transition from centralized to decentralized determination of the employment conditions;

      --A shift from statutory to contractual or managerial governance;

      --A development from career systems to post-bureaucratic (position systems);

      --A delegation of responsibilities to managers;

      --An alignment of pay levels to private sector practices;

      --A change to special retirement schemes'.

   3. The third domain that is mentioned by Pollitt and Bouckaert is the organizational structure. Again, the authors identified a number of types of approaches that they considered as being the 'mainstream' of the organizational reforms:

      --Specialization (should institutions be single-purpose or multi-purpose?);

      --Coordination (by what means should coordination across different functions, levels, and sectors be achieved?);

      --Centralization/decentralization (what functions should be centralized/decentralized, and to what degree?); and

      --Scale (what is the optimum size for organizations?) (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 96).

   4. The fourth field identified by the authors is performance measurement: 'Performance measurement is becoming more extensive. More levels and more fields are included. Performance measurement is becoming more intensive because more management functions are included (not just monitoring but also decision-making, controlling and even providing accountability). Finally, performance measurement is more external. Its use is not just internal, but also for the members of legislative bodies and even for the public' (Bouckaert apud Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 106).

      The fragments presented above referred to situations when countries were trying to cope with crisis (usually economic in nature but with possible social and political consequences). In what follows we will approach administrative reforms from a different context: that of the countries that have to cross the difficult experience of moving from authoritarian or totalitarian communist regimes to capitalist democracies. Reforms in the former communist countries in their transition to democracy, at least as design, were different in nature from those undertaken in consolidated democracies in order to improve the functioning of the administrative institutions. Whilst in the latter cases the scopes of reforms were related to changes in existing administrative structures or institutions, in the former cases most often everything had to be constructed from the very beginning. 'It is not a mere process of improvement as it is in the case of mature democracies; it is more profound and requests the fundamental change of the political life and of the political leadership style' (Sigrist, 2008, p. 59). Communist regimes were based on the domination of the Communist Parties, in most of the cases being the only party that was legally allowed to function (Poland was an exception). State institutions were controlled and even taken over by the ranks of the party. 'The communist bureaucracy (nomenklatura) became a new ruling class and the new elite of the totalitarian society' (Liebert, Condrey and Goncharov, 2013, p. 4). Local, regional or even state authorities were strictly controlled by the central government (the case of Slovakian government being totally subordinated to the government and party authorities from Prague; from 1968 Czechoslovakia was officially a federation). Nevertheless, even if the starting points and the processes were different from those of the old member states, the model was there.

      More than twenty countries abolished the communist regime in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 (these include the new created states after the dissolution of Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; also, Czechoslovakia divided in two different states). Only some of these countries undertook and managed successfully the process of transition from the communist regimes to democracy. For many of them the accession in European Union and NATO was considered to be ends for this journey or at least very important benchmarks.

      The road to democracy was a process of massive institutional change. New legislation had to be drafted in almost every field of activity. Political and administrative institutions had to be reformed or new ones had to be created. Analyzing the process of democratization in former communist countries that undertook this ordeal, we may state that it was largely successful in most of them, especially in the case of those that were integrated in European Union. Multipartidism, regular and free elections with changes of the political leadership, freedom of press, free-market economy, active civil society, local or regional autonomy, and fairly independent justice systems are elements of functional democracies that are present in many of the former communist countries.

      However, if we analyze it now, after 25 years of transition, the pace of reforms was different from country to country, important differences remaining in terms of development, infrastructure, economy or performance of the public sector between Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, the Baltic countries, or Slovakia on the one hand, and Romania and Bulgaria on the other hand. In a working paper issued by European Commission in 2012, Bulgaria and Romania were placed at the bottom of the list of the 27 EU member states [1] in terms of quality of governance. The highest position belonged to Denmark with 1.978 WGI (World Governance Indicator). The former communist countries had scores between 1.043 (Estonia) and 0.55 [2] (Poland), and then we have the gap: Bulgaria 0.100 and Romania 0.059. Also, an analysis of the data, like the evolution of GDP/capita2 or of the average wages [3], shows differences between countries like Czech Republic and Slovenia (82), Slovakia (75), Lithuania and Estonia (73), Romania (55) and Bulgaria (45) [4]. Similar differences may be observed in the field of infrastructure (highways [5]).

      Administrative reforms may be considered successful to a large extent in countries like Slovenia (Kovac, 2011; OECD, 2012), Slovakia (van Mierlo and Verheijen, 1998; OECD, 2014; Klimovsky, 2010), Czech Republic (Hladik and Kopecky, 2013; Nunberg, 2000), Poland (OECD, 2013; Majcherkiewicy, 2008), Hungary (Hajnal, 2013; Buss, 2002) and the Baltic countries (according to the data presented above).

      But this image may be a deceptive one. Keneth Sigrist, former adviser to the Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, made two peculiar notices:

1. 'Reforms in Central and Eastern European countries were sectorial and sequential, lacking the global (holistic) approach;

2. This kind of approach is likely to produce institutional difficulties in the future and even affect the democratic character of these states' (Sigrist, 2008, p. 60).

   Indeed, if we look at the picture from a different...