State administration reform has been ongoing for more than a decade in
Montenegro. During this period, two strategies were adopted, legal and
institutional frameworks for management of the reform have been changed,
as well as the mere structure of the state apparatus. However, there has not
been much progress. State administration is still, according to the remarks
of European Commission, highly politicized, cumbersome, and with limited
capacities. As such, it represents obstacle to the country’s faster integration
into the EU. Precisely this strategic goal of European integration poses the
need for an accelerated professionalization, depoliticization and modernization
of the state staff and its enabling to respond to the challenges of
Montenegro’s accession negotiations with the EU.
The systemic reform of state administration in Montenegro should thus
be intensified in the upcoming period. Institute Alternative has prepared
an overview of the so far state administration reform in the analysis “State
Administration Reform in Montenegro: Between Ambitious Plans and Real
Possibilities”. The analysis is a result of the one year long work. The intention
of the authors is to give an overview of all the elements of the state
administration reform in Montenegro at one place. This comprehensive
task is structured in a way to include all segments of the reform as they are
defined in Public administration Reform Strategy for the period 2011-2016,
and these are: civil service system, administrative procedures, quality of
legal acts and strategic documents, public finances. The analysis also gives
an overview of the so far strategic and institutional support to the reform,
its monitoring and evaluation. Work at these chapters ensured indicating
approximate annual costs of the current state administration system.
Apart from the critical overview of the deficiencies in implementation of
the reform, each chapter contains recommendations for overcoming those
deficiencies.
Institute conducted a public opinion survey in 2012 in cooperation with
Ipsos Strategic Marketing, at the representative sample of 840 adult Montenegrins.
Their attitudes about the work of state administration have been
surveyed. Data have been collected during the face-to-face field research in
the respondents’ households. People assessed the quality of work of state
administration at the ten levels scale. Higher grade implied higher level
of quality. The average grade by which Montenegrins assess the quality of
work of the state administration is 4,5 and it is lower than in the previous
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surveys. This trend and perceptions of respondents suggest that the public
confidence in work of the state institutions is decreasing.
Final observations within the analysis deal with principles of state administration
functioning within the European administrative space.