Suchergebnisse

Marian Zulean works for the office of the Romanian president as an expert on NATO and U.S. issues. This essay has been written with the support of a NATO-Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council research fellowship. An earlier version was presented at the 2002 International Political Science Association's international conference "Globalization of Civil-Military Relations:Democratization, Reform, and Security." The author would like to acknowledge the support of NATO's Academic Office and Constantine Danopoulos.

The main goal of this review is to present a book that describes the recent history of the World Bank and the contribution of Michael M. Cernea (a sociologist of Romanian origin) to the organizational transformation and adaptation of the World Bank missions. The book is organized in three parts and world-known personalities and World Bank specialists explain not only the organizational adaptation of the World Bank and the way in which social sciences contributed to the structuring of public policies, but also the influence that a social scientist – Michael M. Cernea – had on those proceses.

Since 1989, reforms have sought to align the Romanian post-communist intelligence community with its counterparts in established democracies. Enacted reluctantly and belatedly at the pressure of civil society actors eager to curb the mass surveillance of communist times and international partners wishing to rein in Romania's foreign espionage and cut its ties to intelligence services of non-NATO countries, these reforms have revamped legislation on state security, retrained secret agents, and allowed for participation in NATO operations, but paid less attention to oversight and respect for human rights. Drawing on democratization, transitional justice, and security studies, this article evaluates the capacity of the Romanian post-communist intelligence reforms to break with communist security practices of unchecked surveillance and repression and to adopt democratic values of oversight and respect for human rights. We discuss the presence of communist traits after 1989 (seen as continuity) and their absence (seen as discontinuity) by offering a wealth of examples. The article is the first to evaluate security reforms in post-communist Romania in terms of their capacity to not only overhaul the personnel and operations inherited from the Securitate and strengthen oversight by elected officials, but also make intelligence services respectful of basic human rights.

The article provides a complementary view to those accounts of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe that (a) explain its development primarily as a reflection of changes in administrative cultures while (b) emphasizing the ongoing process of curricular diversification. Rather, the article shifts the focus on the internal dynamics of higher education. It shows that the development of Romanian public administration education can be attributed, to a considerable extent, to unique opportunities arising in a period of post-communist re-institutionalization, of which enterprising academics ably took advantage. It further argues that, curricular variety notwithstanding, public administration departments in this country may be growing more alike in other respects. In so doing, the article contributes to an expansion of the traditional narrative of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Europe.

Purpose
The purpose of this practice-oriented paper is to look at a recent, late-phase development in public administration (PA) reform in Romania, specifically the drafting of the recently adopted national Strategy on Strengthening the Efficiency of Public Administration (2014-2020). In particular, the paper focuses on the opportunities and limits of outsourcing the building of the vision underlying the strategy and the prioritization of strategic objectives. The article's story is also placed in the broader context of agencification literature and, more specifically, the involvement of executive agencies in policymaking.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper describes the vision-building exercise, developed according to a script already tested in several sectoral strategy-making processes, and the objectives and procedure of the online participatory consultation by using an adapted real-time Delphi format (similarly tested in the recent past).


Findings
The paper reports on the ways in which the output of the visioning process and of online consultations may be used to enhance a strategic process already underway.


Originality/value
PA reform in post-communist countries has been among the most hotly debated, intensely pursued, yet seemingly elusive policy objectives of the transition and post-transition periods. Among pre-accession and then European Union (EU) member states, the need to get in and then to get involved in European policymaking provided some impetus for such reforms and also set substantial constraints, without however always adding much predictability or significantly streamlining the public sector. The paper contributes to this debate by proving an innovative method of devising a reform strategy by outsourcing the strategy-building process to an agency with the necessary know-how and experience.

The book focuses on the nexus between geopolitical challenges and cultural framework in the Black Sea region. Employing an interdisciplinary approach and using survey research evidence, the volume demonstrates that the Black Sea region is a cultural area with shared domains and trends.