Question

Explain the managerial approach to public administration and include references.

Answer 1

Managerial Approach in Romania -

After World War II, Romania entered in the Russian sphere of influence as all the other Eastern European countries, leading to a change of the political regime, from a constitutional monarchy to a totalitarian communist regime. This change had an important impact on all levels of the society. From the public administration point of view this meant a big change not only regarding the structure, organization and functioning, but also regarding the academic field. Because of the communist ideology, Public Administration as an independent discipline never existed. We cannot talk about a civil service in the Western sense of the word. “Communist ideology and the immediate interests of the regime took precedence as opposed to merit principles, specialized training, administrative competence and high ethical standards. The separation of policy development and administration left the civil service with a residual role in technical implementation […] Therefore the main form of civil service education during this period was party political training, instructing bureaucrats how to comply with party policy and strictly implement party decisions”.The public sector before 1989 can be characterized as a centralized system, built to respond promptly to the parties commands with a strong hierarchical control, recruitment system based only on party recommendations; lack of ethics code and a strong legalistic culture guiding all the administration activities; oversize of the administrative structure with high personnel turn-over rate leading to uncertainty and corruption.

Changes after 1989 -

The fall of the communist regime gave the possibility to the reestablishment of a democratic political system with a public administration resembling its Western counterparts – at least in theory. The new Romanian democracy was facing a serious challenge: on one hand, it had to assure a strong economic development in order to create a market economy and to sustain a reasonable high level of social protection2 – solving these issues would enforce legitimacy of the new political leaders. But it had to do this with an administrative apparatus inherited from the former regime. The problem faced was quite difficult: reforming the state while still performing everyday functions, continuing to provide public goods and services and deal with the economic and social problems of transition. Romania was facing in some sense the problems that Western countries faced at the beginning of the ‘70’s when the “welfare state” had to reduce costs while maintaining the same level of social services; the difference was that Romania had a pre-bureaucratic administrative system (in some aspects it still has today) and had to make a “giant” leap to a postbureaucratic one. After 1989, probably the most utilized word by the political leaders was “reform”. Every party leader, regardless of ideology, was talking about reform of the economy, reform of the state, public administration reform or government reform. Despite of all this verbal debates actual reform was scarce, ambiguous and incremental especially in the beginning of the ’90’s. One cause for this was the political culture of the new leaders, the majority of them coming from the second echelons of the communist party structures and having a vision of the public administration that was not congruent with modern administrative organization and functioning. There was also a real reticence towards adopting western models and principles not only in the public sector but also in the private, slogans like “we don’t sell our country” being very common in this period.

Accomplished Reforms and New Management Ideas -

Looking back on what was said until now, we can see that the changes that took place after 1989 in the field of public administration lack coherence and vision, and the majority had a legal character. However there were real reform initiatives and programs after 2000 based on new management ideas and principles already seen in Western countries. In 2001 the Government adopts a strategy on public administration reform developed in collaboration with the EU, which was updated and continued also after the 2004 elections. The declared goal of this strategy was the creation of a more efficient and transparent public administration and a professional body of civil servants. “In accordance with the European Commission, the Government has identified three major fields of interventions where there is need for substantial progress: public function, decentralization and deconcentration of public services and public policy formulation”. Government Updated Strategy regarding the Acceleration of the Public Administration Reform Process, 2004-2006). The Reform of the Civil Service had the aim of creating a professional, stable and independent body of civil servants through the implementation of coherent human resource management strategies and assuring a stable and independent of political interference work environment. The Reform of Local Public Administration by continuing the process of decentralization and deconcentration of public services had the aim of delivering better services and products through the adoption of new management techniques that will raise quality, transparency of public activities and offer better access to these services. Public Policy Formulation process will be reformed by creating systems of coordination and management capacity building of government structures (Government Updated Strategy regarding the Acceleration of the Public Administration Reform Process, 2004-2006). It is the first time when a comprehensive approach to reforming public administration was made by using public management as a key instrument of modernization, trying to pull off from the legal approach. Another important step was the creation of the Central Unit for Public Administration Reform (CUPAR) in 2002 integrated in the structure of the Ministry 94 of Interior and Public Administration Reform. CUPAR’s mission is to co-ordinate the reform process in public administration in Romania through (http://modernizare.mai. gov.ro/documente/Brosura% 20pentru%20Tampere.PDF, p.6): • Monitoring the way of implementing the regulations foreseen into the public administration reform strategy and programs, elaborated on the basis the Government Program; • Proposing instruments, mechanisms and procedures of public management to be introduced/implemented at the central and local public administration level; • Identifying, programming, elaborating, coordinating and monitoring the implementation of the programs with external financing in public administration domain; • Offering technical assistance to the public administration institutions in CAF (Common Assessment Framework) implementing and monitoring process. Some of the projects that CUPAR has implemented are: Young Professionals Scheme “Developing The Corps Of Professional Public Managers”(YPS) with the goal of preparing a core group of new generation leaders in the civil service, politically neutral and professionally trained in the modern principles and values of European Union public sector management. “The first cycle has been implemented resulting in 114 public managers placed into 17 institutions of public administration at central and local levels between 2003-2005.The performance assessment of the first public managers, pointed out that, in most of the cases, they were valuable resources for the organization” (http://modernizare.mai.gov.ro/documente/ Brosura% 20pentru%20Tampere.PDF, p.7). Decentralization and De-concentration Process led by the Central Administration aimed at developing the institutional and legal framework, elaborating and implementing a monitoring system for the decentralization process, providing technical assistance in respect to the elaboration of the secondary legislation. Common Assessment Framework (CAF) (self-assessment tool introduced in 2005) aimed at providing a comprehensive picture of the activities carried out by public institutions in relation to their mission and the achieved results. The implementation of such a tool had different stages starting with training sessions on total quality aspects and use of CAF organized for both top management and operational level (prefects, county councils). This was followed by actual implementation of the tool in 29 public institutions for a clear diagnosis of the institution regarding the quality of the managerial practices and the achieved results. This resulted in 280 civil servants being trained in using self-assessment tools and the elaboration of improvement action plans for all 29 institutions based on the results of self-evaluation. Multi-annual Modernization Program (MMP) is a program aimed at raising administrative capacity of public institutions by using strategic planning in the implementation of reform policies at local level. This monitoring instrument helps prioritize the reform initiatives at the level of implementing institutions (Prefect Institution and County Council); it’s a typical bottom-up approach that gives the advantage of focusing only on those initiatives or policies that are relevant to a specific community and to the institutions that are supposed to implement these policies. This offers the basis for continuous innovation and modernization of the public administration. 95 Until august 2006 4 Ministries, 35 Prefectures and 29 County Councils had published their strategies, action plans and monitoring reports up to date. Administrative Simplification - New Administrative Culture the focus of this policy was to making administrative regulations simpler and creating a more open administration to the citizen. The program had a broad spectrum of activities from simplifying registering procedures (for vehicles) by adopting modern IT technologies, adopting a so called “one stop shop” practice in public institutions for evaluating the responsiveness of the system to citizens expectations and finishing with the simplification of procedures for delivering certain permits or civil acts – working permits, passport, id cards.