A number of actions have been initiated during the past two decades in Roma- nia, like elsewhere in the region, to address these PAR requirements and improve Romania’s scorecard in cross-country evaluations.vi Among the three areas of reform previously noted, decentralization is probably the one in which the most progress has been realized since 1990. By and large, a reasonably functional system of local governance was created through successive legislative acts adopted in 1991, 1994, 1998, and 2001. Local autonomy was substantially increased in 1998–1999, when local taxation discretion was increased and formula-based rules were introduced for a number of financial transfers from the national budget. Serious problems remain, however, with enforcing the formal rules of the decentralization game, and this creates perverse incentives, clientelism, and inefficiency in local governments.
Crucial policies and procedures are ignored, interpreted creatively, or openly not complied with to perpetuate old patterns of patronization and subordination of lower tiers by upper levels of government. In turn, those local governments with the right political connections enjoy a loosely managed environment in which there are no hard budgetary constraints and everything is negotiable on a case-by-case basis.
Certain financial allocations are made in defiance of the State Budget Law to build political networks within a given territory. Other allocations, such as funding to support and improve infrastructure, are not only discretionary but also opaque, so it is hard for independent observers or the public to see where the money went and why. Unfortunately, tolerance for such historically entrenched practices remains high in Romania today.
To address the broader problem of integrity in administration, a comprehen- sive anticorruption legislative package was adopted and has been improved several times. It includes, among other things, asset and interest disclosure requirements for top dignitaries and civil servants, measures to enhance the anticorruption insti- tutional framework, and new civil service laws. These laws aim at better defining the scope and status of the civil service in Romania and raise the threshold in the process of depoliticization by transforming a number of senior appointed positions into a special class of senior civil servants. The office of the county prefectvii is one example of such a position affected by the new civil service laws. A Freedom of Information Act and a sunshine law also came into effect to open the decision- making process to public consultation and participation. In addition, new public procurement procedures were implemented, including the incorporation of an e- procurement system, to enhance administrative integrity.
A number of special interministerial committees were established to deal specif- ically with public administration reform issues, and a permanent Central Unit for Public Administration Reform (CUPAR) was established within the new Ministry of Administration and Internal Affairs to assist the process and organize broad con- sultations with social stakeholders. In addition, the National Institute for Admin- istration (INA) was created directly under the national government as a special
institution of higher education and was designed to provide executive programs for and award a university degree to senior civil servants. Finally, with the help of donors (mainly the EU), special study grants and fast-track career schemes were created for young would-be civil servants educated in Western universities.
However, it is questionable that all this legal and institutional frenzy has always produced useful outcomes. Overall, the same general impression lingers that laws are passed to check boxes in the matrices of conditionality imposed by international partners, rather than these laws having meaningful impacts in reality. The Civil Service Law was adopted as a precondition for Romania to be admitted to start EU accession negotiations in Helsinki in 1999. Its purpose was to insulate public offi- cials from political pressure and institute a civil service with European-style disci- pline, professionalism, and high spirits. However, this Civil Service Law presented no obstacle against a politically motivated reshuffle of the public sector when a new government assumed power. And in some cases, only the names of institutions were changed as a pretext for reorganization and the subsequent dismissal of nominally stable civil servants.
In Romania, some administrative changes have been well intended but half- baked. For example, the legal obligation that each of the 110,000 civil servants from the central and local administrations take at least seven days of training per year creates an annual public liability estimated at about US$50 million. This requirement exceeds by far the current supply of training on the Romanian mar- ket, and government officials have admitted that the INA can cover only about 10 percent of the demand, at best. And the INA has problems. Having adopted the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) as a model for training senior civil servants, the Romanian version of such institutionalized administrative training is unlikely to replicate anytime soon ENA’s strengths (e.g., top-class education and esprit de corps), although it is very probable to replicate its weaknesses (e.g., club mentality and a preference for deals based on informal personal connections). Such weaknesses will only reinforce existing shortcomings in the Romanian civil service and will probably add exotic flavors to the original educational model when trans- planting it to a Balkan country.
This environment makes the life of civil servants in Romania very difficult and very different from the environments of their Western counterparts. The combined action of uncertainty and relatively low paymentviii creates a civil service that is not only less professional than those in developed countries but also much more heterogeneous.3 The majority of its members are petty clerks who survived in their functions since communist times or are new dropouts from the private sector. Frus- trated by their low income but unsure enough of their own skills, they cling to their civil servant jobs by taking refuge in safe daily routines, playing bureaucratic power games, and yielding to political pressures coming from above.
On the other hand, a bolder strategy is pursued by a small number of people, especially at the higher echelons, who regard a stage in the civil service as an invest- ment in their professional résumé, a future political career, or a step toward a more
lucrative job in the private sector or with a foreign organization. Some of them may even be Western educated and thus constitute a nucleus of competence within their immediate environment. But their tenure in public service tends to be short, and their impact on the overall performance of their respective public institutions remains uncertain.
Differences may be found in the levels of professionalization within and stabil- ity among Romania’s public institutions, of course. For example, the central banks and finance ministries in developing countries have been identified as typically being the first public institutions to develop “linkage elites” who speak the concep- tual language of their international professions.4 However, their numbers are yet too small to alter the current overall picture of the Romanian civil service. Thus, today’s Romanian civil service may best be described as a mass of disgruntled and ineffective staff punctuated by small and transient groups who understand and try to push forward meaningful reforms.
Actually, as many consultants on twinning programsix have come to realize, there is still no civil service as such in countries like Romania. Instead, there is a collection of sectoral and opaque bureaucracies operating on a mismatch of sec- tor-specific arrangements around which powerful vested interests have solidified in time. There is no unified structure to manage this army of people, limited or no integrity within its body is the norm, and even the conceptual limits of the civil service are fuzzy. For example, the usual way Romanian local governments deal with salary fund caps without laying people off is by moving them nominally to new off-budget institutions. Many government institutions and agencies employ public-interest arguments to create special rules applicable only to their situation, or they manage to get tacitly accepted practices that deviate from the general norm.
Job descriptions are unclear, and performance on the job is not measured in mean- ingful or objective ways. Actually, the very concept of performance measurement is still strange to top public managers in Romania. With help from donors, the effort to develop a database and a system of indicators to assess the situation has been going on for some years. However, the National Agency of Civil Servants (NACS, technically a state secretariat under the Ministry of Administration and Interior) is reluctant to even develop measurements of output and outcome, partly because this has never been done and partly out of fear of stepping on someone else’s proverbial toes. Thus, a working civil service system is perceived in Romania as being not only hard to administer but also difficult to understand, and the government has shown little appetite for tackling the core of the problem thus far.
In general, management of the Romanian civil service remains haphazard, frag- mented, and discretionary. Employees use obscurity as a cover for incompetence or worse. There is little institutional memory such that when employees in respon- sible positions leave the institution, it is usually difficult to track back through the history of programs or projects for which these employees were responsible.
By default, the Romanian civil service remains secretive, and relevant informa- tion is kept away from the public as the only comparative advantage of otherwise
unemployable clerks. Since NACS is politically weak, it cannot perform effective horizontal screening during the recruitment process across the whole administra- tion, as its mandate requires. The newly introduced annual evaluation does not rank employees according to their actual performance, because the highest performance rating is awarded to virtually all employees in practice. Rather, the portion of salary increases that are supposed to be based on individual performance is regarded as a wage supplement to be shared equally by the whole team, as it would otherwise be too low to be stimulative and may unnecessarily create envy among colleagues.
Loyalty to the boss and the institution are the things that pay metaphorical dividends, so they are the only traits that tend to be selected naturally. Overstaff- ing may coexist with understaffing, often in departments of the same institution, so it is difficult to tell from the outside exactly what the situation is or to influence change in the right direction. There are no reliable estimates available concerning the costs of this civil service to society, its hiring and firing practices, or its salary rules and levels. A simple question such as, “How much does employee X earn per year?” is tricky to answer and may even be perceived as improper or slightly offensive because every agency devises its own arrangement for salary increases and off-the-book compensations that they would rather not discuss publicly. As a result, it is difficult to develop a system by which to manage the civil service more predictably or to introduce modern motivational elements such as training-related promotions and career development schemes, even if the political will for such reforms existed.
Ultimately, the idea of political independence of the Romanian administration is still a novelty, the assumption being that political parties winning elections will apportion all things public among themselves. Corruption, when it occurs, is not so much the result of isolated individual decisions to extract a small payment as a salary supplement (petty corruption), although this may be the most visible and annoying form of corruption to ordinary citizens. Rather, the most dangerous forms of cor- ruption have to do with the general environment of political clientelism, leading to systematic discriminatory treatment or favors for various categories of clients, which emanates from the top (grand corruption).x
Despite such a defective civil service, several noteworthy accomplishments have been realized, especially in the early stages of Romania’s efforts to reform its public administration. Examples of successful reform programs include early price and trade liberalization, partial dismantlement of old regulatory mechanisms, macro- stabilization of the economy, and simplification of the system and rules governing taxation.6 These initiatives required political will and some technical capacity of design but little administrative capacity in implementation and were thus often promoted quickly by a small circle of senior officials with political support.xi How- ever, decisions to take action in each of these cases had more to do with the state getting out of various sectors and freeing private entrepreneurship and less to do with ensuring the quality of Romania’s governmental bureaucracy.
But as postcommunist reforms have entered the second stage, where more com- plex public systems involving many stakeholders should be changed while continu- ing to function (i.e., education, health, social protection, economic development, and promotion), the coherence and professionalism of the public bureaucracy have become crucial factors. In Romania, although the reforms of the first type were more or less successfully imposed on bureaucracies by linkage elites and politi- cal leaders, attempts to implement second-stage reforms have led to bureaucratic sabotage and open retaliation against the initiators. Moreover, when arbitrary and politically driven purges of the civil service occur, the people who compose the small pockets of expertise are the first to leave Romania’s public institutions either because they are most visibly associated with the political sponsors of reform or because they are the most professionally mobile segment of the civil service popula- tion as a result of their expertise.
One important second-generation reform is that of the civil service. What was lacking here was not only implementation capacity within the system but also a firm commitment to reform from top administrative officials. If such reform is to be successful, however, members of the prime minister’s cabinet should be willing to spend some political capital on painful decisions, including, but not limited to, staff reductions. Delegating the unpleasant task of restructuring the whole body of public administration to junior ministers, as it is usually done, is not working, because they cannot reform departments managed by more powerful senior col- leagues. Such political determination at the top is something very rare in the region of CEE or elsewhere, which explains why civil service reform is typically viewed as a permanent work in progress.8