Public Administration Reform without Significant Results

Although, the public administration reform has been in focus for over 10 years, on which more than 10 million KM of donor funds have been spent, the Public Administration Strategy that was adopted in 2006 has had very limited impact on citizens and quality of service that citizens receive from the public administration institutions.

While presenting the project, Ms. Lejla Ibranović, program manager of the TI BiH, emphasized that the public administration reform is a priority in the process of joining the EU, but the political elite in BiH has not been committed to the reform processes, and the public administration reform has been seen only as one of the conditions that BiH has to fulfill rather than the key precondition for effective government and economic growth.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Pelle Persson, Director of Swiss International Development Agency in BiH (SIDA), said that aside from the lack of the political will for more efficient reform, the main reason for the lack of the progress is division within the administration that enables political influence on public administration and its clientele, which cannot result in more efficient spending of public finds and work of the public administration.

The politicization of administration and employment that is not based on merits, that lead to the lack of competent staff, inadequate mechanisms for evaluation of employee’s performance, incompetence of the management’s structures and general lack of integrity are recognized as key issues in the field of human resources management.

The complexity of administration structures and inadequate management of human resources lead to inefficiency in the expenditure of public funds, having in mind the percentage of expenditures spent on salaries of public administration employees. However, the research conducted by TI BiH has shown that 45% of budget expenditures have been allocated to salaries, which is far more than 25% that is recommended by the World Bank. Not including the transfers and subventions, this percentage is even higher- 70%, which is additional indication that this proportion cannot enable significant capital investments and development projects which would improve the BiH economy.  When we take into consideration that almost half of the GDP goes to the public administration, the need for the reform that would reduce the administrative apparatus and increase its efficiency is clearer.

Unfortunately, along with the lack of the political support the reform process has encountered other obstacles, such as the lack of coordination between the governments at different levels, poor development and coordination policy, unclear accountability lines, lack of experienced and qualified staff, the administration resistance to change, and so on. For these reasons, it has been emphasized the need for stronger involvement of civil society, which would ensure a link between citizens and public administration and involve them in the reform process in order to implement processes that would give results for the citizens, which is the ultimate goal of this project that will be conducted during the next four years by TI BiH and CIN, with the support of SIDA and the Kingdom of Denmark.