THE 7 th NISPAcee ANNUAL CONFERENCE IMPROVING RELATIONS BETWEEN THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE PUBLIC Sofia, Bulgaria, March 25-27,1999

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1 THE 7 th NISPAcee ANNUAL CONFERENCE IMPROVING RELATIONS BETWEEN THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE PUBLIC Sofia, Bulgaria, March 25-27,1999 REDESIGNING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE ADMINISTRATION AND CITIZENS: AN IMPORTANT TASK OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM Prof. Dr. Emilia Kandeva In a context of increasing economic, political, environmental and demographic interdependence administrative reforms present a challenge to public administrations everywhere. The modern state has to be dramatically changed to enable the critical questions of the twenty-first century to be tackled better. Public administration must respond to the new challenges, and in the process of administrative reform this demands also a reappraisal of attitudes, values and regulations about the relationship between the administration and the citizens. The manner in which a state, and particularly the state administration, treats its citizens is the key to democracy, and the efficiency of the government as well. The administrative reforms are tending to follow two broad avenues to improve the performance of administrative activities and delivery of public services : one, raising the quality of performance of public administration, and, second, strengthening the relationships between the public and private sector and making a greater use of the private sector. The reform package, which include a number of administrative changes as well as a new legislation, is addressing the purposes of administrative reform, namely democracy, efficiency and equity. Citizens should be viewed as a focus of all three purposes of administrative reform. The problem of redesigning the relations between the public administration and citizens is not a problem only of the administrative reform in Bulgaria - it concerns many other countries. A common complaint around the world is that public administrations, irrespective of political and economical structure, are not and have not been performing well for one or another period of time. The public administration stood accused of many things - of being bureaucratic, bloated, expensive, unresponsive, deliberately centralizing, and largely incapable of dealing with new challenges. In many countries there is a widespread perception that government service is below what its citizens need and deserve. The understanding of the relationships between the administration and the public should be consider much broader than only the meaning of the performance of public services and citizens consumer satisfaction. The real issue is the state s role in the face of problems in the economy and society, the interrelationship established between the state and the citizens, the interrelationship between the state and civil society, said in general - how the state should play its role with civil society. The current development of administrative reform in Bulgaria is focusing mainly on the improvement of the organization of the civil service in the meaning of redesigning the structure of the central and territorial administrative bodies and regulating the status of the civil servants. The search of efficiency of public administration is considered mostly in directions of unification of the administrative structures and reduction of the number of civil servants. Reduction in the size and burden of the government has not been seen yet through the aspects of the shift of functions. Reform activities have not concentrated enough on the improvement of the public service through mechanisms of contractingout certain public services and enriching the volume and quality of the relations with citizens. Reducing the institutions or the number of civil servants does not mean that the public administration will function better or that it will become more creative or more responsive to the current needs in shaping policy. To do this the public administration has to turn to the addressee of its efforts and activities - the public - for incentives, corrections, stimulus, performance assessment and satisfaction. The state is undoubtedly challenged by fundamental economic, social, technological, political and geopolitical reorganizations that go well beyond its previous capacity. Democracy and open market economy have been the chosen models and the state is expected to be completely redesigned in order to achieve it. The free market is seen as a tool of promoting social welfare. The citizens are also influenced by the wave of new choices in the economic, social and political reality. Citizens are organizing themselves, they perform citizens actions, they grow more sensitive about their abilities of active intervention in the public affairs, they create a media as a forth power in the state and insist of being informed. After the long decades of authoritarian regime of secrecy and unquestionable obedience, nowadays citizens refuse to accept unfriendly or secretive or very commanding administrative authorities. Instead of a bureaucratic, impenetrable state administration that is alien to its

2 citizens, authoritarian in management style and that discourages free public opinion and participation, now open, fair and confident government is needed. Redesigning the state attitude towards citizens and focusing the public administration on the citizens should be one of the main aims of the administrative reform in Bulgaria. Reinventing democratic and efficient government means giving the real power to the citizens, treating them as clients, adjusting to their real needs, and identifying these needs carefully, and accountable to them.. The traditional authority-subject model of the relationships between the state and the citizens no longer exists. The citizens are on the way to being accepted by administration and its civil servants as partners using the institution public administration. Under extremely difficult circumstances of the on-going reform no universal recipes are known by the government neither by the public. The state and citizens become participants in the process of exploratory searches of efficient, open, wise and democratic governance. An example of unsatisfactory search in this direction by now is the fact that the new administrative legislation prepared as a part of the administrative reform (Law about Administration and Civil Servants Law) does not appear to recognize the necessity of direct focus on the public interest and the attitude to the citizens. The redesigning process encompasses many issues in the relations between the administration and the public, major of them are presented in discussions on the administrative reform, as follows: Transparency/Accountability of public administration. Public acceptance of administration. The problems of fairness, equity and credibility. Quality of public service. Right of choice. The problem of monopoly of the state. Participation. Decentralization. Control of citizens on administration. Securing citizens rights through administrative justice. Right of appeal. Redressing mechanisms. Citizens as clients in public sector. Protecting the public interest. Public service orientation. The relations between public administration and citizens have been increasingly put under the spotlight of public attention. Recent media headlines exposing often examples of administrators rejecting behavior to provide information for the public have fueled concern about the transparency in public life. The public service is increasingly in the focus of public opinion and the media. Critical questions are asked about the ways in which cases have been dealt, about resources spent and about results achieved. Public would like to know how do governments ensure that good conduct in the public service is maintained, especially in times of changes? Willing or not willing it, nowadays the public administration is working in a fishbowl. What was before hidden in party and bureaucratic secrecy is now open to public and media scrutiny. Even if people have no enough information how administrators are performing their functions they are able to catch and evaluate the results. They try to know who is responsible for the proper task and its implementation. In the democratic government the actions of administrative officials are more visible, so their mistakes and misdemeanors. It could be argued that the announced increase in wrongdoing and corruption among public administrators to a great extend is more a function of a greater transparency and scrutiny than an actual increase in cases. Before, under the totalitarian regime, the public was not allowed and not expected to look through communist party and state decisions in order to criticize them. Greater openness in government operations, including through public access to official information, coupled with an increasingly critical media and well organized interest groups means that public administration become more and more open to direct scrutiny. Armed with democratic achievements of the new society the public and the media become more effective watchdogs over the public service. Such issues have been reasoning the preparation of draft of a Information Act. Same issues, as well as, are explaining public criticism to the introduction of some restrictions or bounds of the sources of information in the future Information Act. The new regulations about information should provide full, accurate information, which will be readily available in plain language about how public services are run, what they cost, how well they perform, and who is in charge. Public would be disappointed not finding such approach in the Information Act. Transparency is related with restoring the sense of responsibility. Responsibility is the logical consequence of the authority exercised by officials in public administration. From the legal point of view it is a inevitable element of the powers of the administrative body or official. Responsibility or accountability has also an important social and political dimensions because of representative function of the administration in society. The public officials are seen as representatives of the state and their actions or behavior are important to the other citizens. They share and express a part of the authority of the state, and the prestige that goes with their positions must be accompanied by a sense of duty and an awareness of the importance of their functions and the expectations of the citizens. Accountability has

3 a significant role as well as in the field of public services and citizens satisfaction of them. Making public servants more directly responsive, in a formal way, to users of the public service, raises important issues of accountability. The traditional approaches to accountability are not enough when focusing on the relations between the public administration and citizens in their role as customers. In Bulgaria governmental accountability to the public is through the electoral system. Ministers are accountable to parliament for the action of their ministries and their civil servants. Ministers are traditionally expected to reply in person or as a team with all government to detailed operational questions involving their departments, and to accept the criticism for errors committed by their civil servants (including resignation or even voting non confidence to the government if the error is considered grave enough). Accountability would be enhanced, if along the parliamentary control, responsibility opened for the public will be established for civil-service management down the line. Officials in the civil service often are out of touch with their clients. If they were indeed public servants, it is not at all clear who is being served by them, since they function without a connection with the public. In most of the cases citizens would prefer to know that a responsibility has been asked by the particular civil servants than by the ministers. Attaching accountability only to the top administrators obscures the real picture of civil services and relaxes the sense of irresponsibility of the operative civil servants. Transparency and accountability must be ones of the central values pursued through administrative reform. Responsibility/accountability has been secured quite successfully mostly by normative rules and procedures guaranteeing a strict procedural rules of issuing and controlling the administrative actions. Nowadays the modern state is looking for a shift in the methods of exercising the accountability. The emphasis on rules and procedures as control methods of accountability has become less important than the control on the achieved results. In the reform era, rule-braking and corruption among public administration is not tolerated. There is a strong public reaction to the lack of respect for integrity and honesty among public officials. In exercising discretion, civil servants are expected to ensure that all citizens are treated fairly and equitably under laws, policies, rules and procedures. The social and cultural diversity of the people demands that the values of fairness and equity be practised, especially in respect of the delivery of services. The principles of fairness, legality, equity are proclaimed by the Constitution, but their implementation depends on the administrative infrastructures and services provided for particular groups of population or individuals. Credibility of public administration in serving public interest is related with public identity with the served public interest, and the acceptance of the administrative actions by the public. It is essential for the new model of the relationships between the state and the public. Credibility in public service must be recovered in the country, where before it has been eroded by the communist ideology, that tended to associate public service with party interests, and then and more recently by inefficiency of certain sectors of it. Existing corruption has its negative contribution to the lack of trust to public administration. To a great extend, the public confidence in public administration depends on its performance in delivering goods and services and its ability to carry out various socio-economic programmes. In order to maintain citizens confidence in the public service, the public servants must have adequate motivation and commitment, so they can serve the public more effectively and satisfactory. It is important also if officials are able to feel that their work is appreciated and acknowledged by the public. A perceived fundamental problem in the treatment of citizens as clients is that government organisations tend to have monopoly over the provision of certain types of public services. Regardless of the efforts of privatising a great part of public sector industry, basic public services such as electricity, energy, water supply are practically monopoly of the government - central or local. Even services like high education, where private universities were created after the democratic changes, are now in the conditions (in accordance of the requirements of the amended High Education Law) to be reduced and concentrated in few, mostly state, universities. The absence of any effective competition, combined with monopoly or near monopoly over information and funds, enables the agencies to extract all profits provided by the state policies and legislation. In addition to the financial implications of monopoly, there are serious implications for public service. The monopoly agencies have little or no incentive to improve the quality of their services to citizens, and indeed have an incentive to provide as little service on high prices as possible in order to extract as much income, whether as actual money or as leisure. This field of relations between the government and citizens is strongly influenced by the fact that when there is a monopoly it is not clear who has being served in the case - the state or the public. This steams from the very nature of government service and the need to ensure fairness among all recipients of services. This need for equality tends to produce a somewhat excessive reliance on rules

4 and regulations that is compounded by the traditional model of civil service personnel management. If civil servants believe that the only way they can be fired or sanctioned is by failing to follow the rules of the administrative organisation, then they are unlikely to engage in entrepreneurial actions, even if such actions may benefit the public. Monopoly influences the relations between the public administration and citizens in more than one negative way. It reduces or fails citizens opportunities of choice. One of the expected ends of the administrative reform is to create conditions for a choice among provision of public services. The public sector should provide choice wherever practicable. There should be regular consultation with those who use services. Users views and priorities should be taken into account in deciding upon standards. A consistent criticism of the public sector is that the standards are poor, especially when compared to the private sector. Explicit standards should be set, monitored and published for the services that individual users can reasonably expect. Of course, they should secure efficient and economical delivery of public services within the country s fiscal resource constrains, and that should be explained to the public. The standards could be served as a base for citizen s regress to administration when expected quality of public services is not satisfying. The new administration should be sensitive to the quality and standards of public services in order to treat the citizens as customers. In this aspect is also very important putting the things right. Mistakes, negligence, and failure to meet specified standards of service should be met by an apology, a full explanation and swift and effective remedy, including compensation where appropriate. Citizens control on public administration is a particular form of the citizens participation. Of great importance are the legal arrangements for administrative and judicial review of administrative action. The Bulgaria legal system provides complains procedures, regulated by the Administrative Procedure Act, Law about Supreme Administrative Court, and Law about Liability of the State for Damages of Citizens and Organisations. Citizens have the right to approach all state authorities with complains and grievance. Citizens have the right to complain against unpropre and unlawful administrative actions before the superior administrative authority of supervision. The Constitution proclaims the right of citizens to complain before the court unlawful act of public administration, including the normative acts of the government and the municipal councils. Detailed laws are offering suitable forms and procedures for practical application of this right. The Law about Liability of the State for Damages of Citizens and Organisations provides an efficient procedure of suing the state for damages caused to citizens by wrong and unlawful doings of administration and civil servants. Citizens participation has many legal forms, in particular voting in election for president, members of the Parliament, mayors and members of the municipal councils. Population may use other forms of direct democracy such as a right of referenda and population meetings for deciding specific important administrative matters. There are many other formal and informal ways of citizens participation in government of the democratic state. Decentralisation, however, is a democratic issue not very often discussed in relations with public participation, but it should be. At a political level, decentralisation enables people to participate in a real and effective way in the management of public affairs. Decentralisation is conductive to responsiveness to the needs of day-to-day living of the people. The citizens of the locality are given the opportunity to influence and alter the course of events by participating in decisions relating to issues which affect them. At an economic and social level, decentralisation is a necessary condition for local development, where proper local development plans are qualitatively different from the regional components of national plan, and which, within the context of effective decentralisation, mobilise valuable local energies, human resources included, around integrated projects. Promoting an efficient, competitive and open public procurement system for contracting out production of publicly provided services should be oriented towards improvement of the services for the citizens. Contracting out with private parties to produce public services is shifting the delivery of services from the public to the private sector, but does not shift the responsibility of the quality of the services along this. The point is that the services are publicly provided; citizens deal with private actors acting, in some way, on behalf of the government. The government contracting with private parties to produce public services puts important questions, which the new legislation on concessions and public procurement should answer, such as: What are the rights of citizens and business? What are channels of redress for citizens when the private actor does not provide public services at a quality level, and which system of law and accountability operates - public, or private, or both? How to protect public interest, and in the same time, protect and stimulate business interest? No matter how broadly applied, privatisation and contracting out could hardly affect all operations of public administration. A wide range of activities must remain in the public sector. The public administration can look at the private sector for inspiration, competition, choice, courtesy and

5 helpfulness to the clients needs, value for money that will influence in very positive way the relations with citizens. The solution is to introduce management approaches and a management culture to public administration. The old bureaucratic values, bureaucratic hierarchy and weak internal and external communication systems are going to be replaced by stronger political leadership to adjust the workings of public administration, and to introduce the notion of accountability to clients in to public service operations.