Re(De)-Forming public administration: an expert outlook on reform planning in Romania
It has been argued that the West with its well-established democracies was largely responsible for the filling of the institutional vacuum the East experienced after the fall of totalitarian regimes in the eve of the 90s. Scholars of international relations and public policies loudly debated on the...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
General Association of Economists from Romania
2012-08-01
|
| Series: | Theoretical and Applied Economics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
http://store.ectap.ro/articole/766.pdf
|
| Summary: | It has been argued that the West with its well-established
democracies was largely responsible for the filling of the institutional
vacuum the East experienced after the fall of totalitarian regimes in the
eve of the 90s. Scholars of international relations and public policies
loudly debated on the existent causality between the European
enlargement and the administrative reforms Central and Eastern
European countries experienced in the last two decades. Be it in the form
of soft or hard law, financial aid or penalties, Western norms were
supposed to have been transferred to acceding countries in a rather alert
tempo, and with a high(er) rate of compliance success. This research
builds on these arguments without yet embracing them completely and
tackles the issue of Western values successful transfer to public
administration reform planning in Romania. The main question it
attempts to answer is to what extent substantial compliance to the
European expectations for building a consolidated public administration
was achieved. In doing so, it compares formal national discourses of
successful public administration reform with personal experiences of
Romanian public managers, four years after Romania’s accession to the
European Union. Between 2005 and 2008, the Romanian Government
acknowledged the need for developing a highly professional, apolitical
category of civil servants later to be called “public managers”. These
managers, young people that were offered Governmental grants to train
themselves in Western universities, were supposed to guide national
reforms from the inside of the system. Their informal role was to use their
Western academic and training experiences and place them against the
national background so as to plan and execute a “good” public
administration reform. Was this achieved? What were the intervening factors? The interviews performed on public managers from central
government organizations are placed against the framework of postenlargement
Europeanization studies and sustain the original hypothesis
of the paper: there is a gap between reform discourse and reform
practice, and transfer of Western values is hardly visible when the agents
of this transfer are solely public managers. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1841-8678 1844-0029 |