and the minister made all decisions. Thus, the influx of additional EU funds has presented new opportunities along with a new problem of administrative capacity, the latter of which has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.
What is more, as a result of this ongoing struggle with its own limited capaci- ties to put to good use all EU funds allocated to Romania, a split seems to have occurred in the Romanian public administration between routine tasks, which consume significant resources but are not eligible for EU funds (social assistance, education, pensions, general government, etc.), and innovative tasks, which are eli- gible for EU funding. The former set of activities have become less attractive and have started to lose qualified people, whereas the latter, especially Project Manage- ment Units (PMUs) and programming and investment departments, have suddenly become very attractive to public sector employees. As a result, the little strategic and managerial capacity possessed by the public sector has been almost fully absorbed into planning and operating EU-financed programs, and even these activities have realized variable success.
At the local and regional levels, too, the few skilled people available are so busy responding to application calls and preparing reports on fund expenditures that little time or capacity is left to deal with anything else. The central and local development strategies have relied almost by default on the relatively complex and progressive agendas promoted by the Poland–Hungary Assistance for Economic Reconstruction program (PHARE)xiii (and since 2004–2005 on the process of pre- paring for structural funds), whereas the main policy target of central and local authorities has become the absorption rate of EU funds. The problem is that EU acquis does not address everything the public sector must do, and substantial areas of domestic policy fall outside the scope of EU financing, as mentioned above.
Therefore, with this increasingly dual policy and administrative process, it will be even more difficult to generate and manage a domestically balanced development agenda.
Finally, there is a trade-off between civil service stability and protection against political interference on one hand and on the other hand the necessity to preserve a certain degree of flexibility in the public sector to allow reforms to continue. After all, politically elected or appointed agency heads are held accountable by the public for the performance of their respective institutions, so they must possess the tools to deliver the expected levels of performance. However, virtually all managers in Romania’s public sector declare today that legislation in the area of human resource management has become far too protective of employees. Consequently, many of Romania’s public managers are relying on unorthodox means when seeking to have a civil servant leave their organization (i.e., applying pressure informally), but these tactics have produced uncertain results.16 Such actions additionally aggravate the problem of politicization previously mentioned and delay the consolidation of a modern and reliable civil service in Romania.
6 Conclusion
All countries, even the developed ones, have in principle to find a solution to the dilemma of accountability versus insulation from politics in the civil service. But in the case of postcommunist states, the problem has been more serious than else- where, for two reasons. First, the scope of reforms in public administration and the services it provides became very wide after 1990. In addition, changes had to be implemented very quickly because the population was impatient after experiencing years of shortages and frustration. Second is integration into the EU, which hap- pened in practically less than a decade and created additional pressures for postcom- munist government institutions to perform on par with the modern bureaucracies of Western Europe. The problem was felt most acutely in a country such as Roma- nia, where the first real postcommunist rotation of elites in power occurred as late as 1996. Until then, there was a significant continuity with the previous regime in terms of administrative cadres and habits, and as a result the best window of oppor- tunity to overhaul the public sector was lost. By contrast, most other countries in CEE performed some form of lustrationxiv in their administration, judiciary, or even universities in the first years of transition after 1990, thereby cleansing the ranks of the most prominent people of the old regime. Although efficiency gains were not the main purpose of this lustration, the overhaul encouraged new and more competent people to join the ranks.
From 1997 on, when the real reformers managed eventually to gain power in Romania too, it was already rather late for such large-scale lustration. New EU- inspired legislation had to be adopted expeditiously to get candidate country sta- tus, which inadvertently protected the unreformed civil service (or judiciary) from political interference. Endowed with self-regulatory bodies, the hard core of the old public administration was therefore able to use the modern European safeguards to control and slow down the pace of change. In consequence, in spite of the frequent organizational changes of the public sector over the past few years, the core of the model of governing by default—characterized by muddled decision making, weak governing institutions, and a poorly performing bureaucracy—was left largely untouched in Romania. Taken together, these factors leave little room for surprise that Romania earned low scores on the comparative good governance indicators shown earlier in this chapter.
Notes
i. A complete description of the Aggregate Governance Indicators of the World Bank can be found at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance.
ii. These are situations when individuals or organizations obtain profits by exploiting or manipulating the institutional environment rather than through trade or the produc- tion of added value.
iii. “State capture” is defined here as a superior form of corruption where the private sec- tor captures large portions of the state apparatus for its own purposes.
iv. This is the body of laws, regulations, and administrative practice of the EU.
v. However, there is a consensus that the pace of reforms increased significantly under the new government after 2004.
vi. An example of these actions is the annual assessment reports from the EU Commission, which, unlike other international ranking tables, carried significant political weight.
vii. Like in France, which was taken as the model when Romanian public administra- tion was created in the 19th century, the prefect is the appointed representative of the central government at the regional level and is in charge of ensuring legality and coherence in the decisions of elected local governments.
viii. In Romania, as in all other countries in CEE, the economic boom in the past years coupled with the opening of the European labor market for its citizens has created innumerable new opportunities and thus increased the gap between private and pub- lic salaries.
ix. These programs provide technical assistance for the public administration provided by the EU in a new member state, in the form of missions where active or retired Western civil servants come and hold trainings or work alongside their local counter- parts for a short period of time.
x. For a more complete understanding of the definitions of and distinctions between petty corruption, grand corruption, and state capture, see reference 5.
xi. Some authors argue that in fact this is the way things always happen in civil service reform, when something is actually done: seminars and consultations meetings are
“more a mechanism of retrospective validation than an input to project design” (see reference 7).
xii. We use here the terminology employed by Janos Kornai in his description of the communist regime as an ad hoc, unpredictable form of governance, where the official plan was in fact only a loose guideline and what happened in practice was the result of power games and permanent negotiations (see reference 15).
xiii. Poland–Hungary Assistance for Economic Reconstruction (PHARE) has been in the past 15 years the most important preaccession instrument for financial aid by the EU in the former communist states. As the name shows, it started in the early 1990s as assistance for the two states mentioned but was rapidly expanded to cover all candidates accepted for EU membership and, to a much lesser extent, some other countries in the “near neighborhood.” PHARE has financed a broad range of inter- ventions, from institution building to social development, local infrastructure, or grants for small and medium enterprises. Other instruments existed too, but PHARE was the largest in terms of scope and volume and was meant to prepare the candidate countries for the structural instruments of the EU. It is scheduled to be phased out beginning in 2007, being replaced by much smaller instruments of assistance to the countries neighboring the enlarged EU.
xiv. Lustration refers to laws that intended to purge politics and the administration of for- mer top Communist Party cadres or political police officers, somewhat similar to the process of denazification in Germany after the war. There were heated debates on this subject in most former communist countries after 1990, but the lustration laws, where adopted, were in reality much weaker and the subject of permanent controversy.
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