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
Ministers still do not receive a complete agenda in advance so that their advi- sors can brief them on the main points to be discussed. A great deal of time is spent on details, although crucial choices either pass unnoticed or are purposefully not addressed to avoid intergovernmental conflicts or criticism in the media. When this happens, the hard decisions are merely postponed and are therefore made implicitly by the bureaucracy in the process of implementation. It is for these reasons that the administrative norms that follow a law are frequently more important than the law itself. Indeed, under these circumstances administrative norms and behaviors vir- tually make law by default. Alternatively, it could be argued that choices in crucial policy areas are not made at all but rather manifested as a result of conflicting pres- sures from the numerous agencies and interest groups that form the government.
Explicit strategies are often missing or are shelved soon after their completion, and it is rare that key options, broad policy principles, and trade-offs among various policy options are discussed.
It may be that the complexities inherent to Romania’s crucial policy areas are not sufficiently understood, because functioning policy analysis units do not exist within the ministries or within the cabinet in its entirety. In addition, policy advice from independent experts is in short supply, and when it is available, it is likely to be distrusted. Moreover, there may be insufficient time to comprehensively analyze and fully understand complex issues because of the cabinet’s being under constant pressure to adopt the EU acquis and being regularly ambushed by bureaucratic entrepreneurs with hundreds of drafts of laws, decisions, and rules dealing with narrow or trivial issues. There is also not a real delegation of authority to lower orga- nizational levels or a competent upper-level bureaucracy with the capacity to pro- cess and integrate information and present broad policy options to decision makers.
As a result, no effective means exists by which to filter information between lower and upper levels, and decisions have thusly become unpredictable, crisis driven, and often irrelevant.9 On a more positive note, several innovations intended to create some sense of openness and responsiveness in the system, including a weekly video- conference of the cabinet with county prefects and local government representatives, have been introduced in the recent past. These efforts, however, tended to aggravate the aforementioned problems by increasing the ad hoc nature of governance and its predisposition to focus on details. Consequently, innovative attempts to better manage the policy-making process in Romania have largely been abandoned.
To the extent there are relatively low levels of cooperation and information exchange between the ministries and the central agencies within Romania’s gov- ernment, intergovernmental issues cannot be effectively identified or dealt with.
There are no policy documents circulated and discussed within the government as a whole, and there is largely no sense that such a process should exist. There is also no policy unit at the central level of government with a clear mandate to help the cabi- net produce and follow a coherent agenda. And it will be difficult to establish this type of central policy unit, because the powerful ministries, correctly regarding
this move as a threat to their monopoly on relevant policy information and freedom of movement, are likely to block any such initiative.
The Romanian requirement of interministerial consultation applies only to legal drafts, which, more often than not, are poorly written, are unclear about objectives and means, and tend to be changing at their source while being evaluated by other institutions. Indeed, the lack of policy documents, white books, and other consul- tation papers written in plain language, and publicized and discussed broadly, has often been singled out as one of the most important, yet overlooked, governance flaws in Romania today.10 In theory, written documents and consultative processes should form the basis of strategic decision making, while laws should be the sub- sequent instruments on which to base implementing policy decisions once they are made. Instead, what happens is that ill-considered laws originating in various ministries avoid difficult policy choices through loopholes, omissions, and vague legal language. Thus when a law does get passed, the relevant key policy issues are either decided in haste, sometimes implicitly in secondary legislation known as norms of implementation and in a process that is purely bureaucratic and largely unaccountable, or never addressed, just to resurface in the process of implementa- tion. In consequence, everyone becomes confused, agencies begin to apply the law discretionarily, and the government rushes to pass another emergency law to deal with the aspects in question. The emergency law, of course, introduces additional problems—and so the treadmill goes on.
Even foreign donors, usually impatient with delays, have come lately to real- ize the problem and are increasingly asking Romanian authorities to allow more time for debates and to discuss key issues openly to increase the quality of acts and regulations. However, this is easier said than done. No focus point for coor- dinating policies has emerged thus far within the Romanian government, and the civil service has no experience with estimating costs associated with various policy options, evaluating their broader social impacts, or assisting decision makers with such expertise. The Secretariat General of the Government (SGG, with ministry status), the natural location of this function, “has no capacity for substantial policy coordination,” and in general “there is little quantitative and qualitative monitoring of policy implementation.”11 Instead, apart from its duty to handle the agenda and other documents required in cabinet meetings, the SGG is regarded as a crisis unit of the cabinet that in recent years has been charged with everything from finding a solution to the problem of abandoned children to coordinating the efforts of pre- fects in cases of flooding or heavy snowfall. As in the area of civil service reform, there is little chance that the capacity needed for effective policy coordination will be developed as long as the top political leadership in Romania fails to realize its importance and remains unwilling to spend some political capital on fixing the problem.
There is in fact nothing new or peculiar to Romania, as a developing nation, having erratic and opaque policies, an unclear agenda at the top, little public con- sultation, poor coordination, and a weak civil service overstepping its mandate
when making crucial decisions by default in the implementation process. In a book on policies in developing countries, Marilee Grindle argued that one of the obvious characteristics of the policy process in developing countries is that the majority of participation and conflict occur at the implementation, or the output stage, of the policy process.12 This is in stark contrast to the experience of both the United States and Western Europe, where participation and conflict are primarily focused instead on the input or policy-making stage.
Grindle identified two reasons for this difference. First, in developing coun- tries there are few organizational structures capable of aggregating the demands and representing the interests of broad categories of citizens. When such structures do exist, they tend to be controlled by elite groups. Second, national leaders with influence over the allocation of policy goods tend to discourage citizen participa- tion in the policy process and view such participation as illegitimate, or at least inefficient. Trapped between weak representation and discouraged participation, citizens and groups are forced to engage with the policy process by presenting indi- vidual demands. Therefore, “factions, patron–client linkages, ethnic ties and per- sonal coalitions” are the most common mechanisms used to access public goods and services.13 The fight begins after a law is passed and the objective of these inter- est groups is not so much to alter it but rather to obtain individual exceptions and preferential treatment through informal means.
This analysis is instructive when translated to the postcommunist space. In spite of its rhetorical claims, communism was arguably a premodern governance system, of the kind described by Grindle.14 While under communist rule, policy agendas in Romania were set by a closed circle of technocrats and approved by key political players who may or may not have coincided with the official political hierarchy. In addition, formal policies determined by the top levels of government became a basis for perpetual vertical and horizontal negotiationsxii within public administration and within the political system, and these negotiations occurred primarily during the implementation stage. Substantial deviations from the original goals of a given policy were tolerated depending on the informal power of each actor involved.
Some strategic documents, as well as other official norms and regulations, were produced by the communist regime, but they tended to be more or less fictional, as the issuing institution was often the first to ignore them. Thus, communism has left behind a legacy that does not encourage broad and open consultation, objective analysis of alternative courses of action and their estimated costs, or the balance of the necessary trade-offs. Within this framework, it may be argued that Romania today employs a system of governing by default that is characterized by an environ- ment of poor coordination from the top, unreliable administrative policies that simply manifest themselves more often than they are deliberately decided, and a considerable divergence between formal institutional policies and norms and the informal real behaviors of social agents.