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Reforming Governance in Social Policy and Practice in Croatia: legacies, influences and hesitations

The ‘second democratic transition’ in Croatia in 2000 opened the space for the transformation of governance practices toward harmonization with Western governance modes. Within that process significant efforts were made to reform social policies, as a core element of public administration, towards greater effectiveness, efficiency and, to an extent, equity. Whilst a ‘crowded playground’ of international actors emerged, there was general agreement on the needed reforms and of the importance of decentralisation, diversification of providers and community-based social planning. Over a decade later, as Croatia prepares to become the 28th EU member state, reform efforts can be judged as having limited, and uneven, results and to have generated a number of unintended and unexpected consequences. This paper seeks to account for why this has been the case, exploring historical, path dependant governance legacies, the inadequacies and imperfections of dominant ‘projectised’ reform transmission modalities, the complex roles of a range of diverse interest groups and policy intermediaries. In addition, the ‘presidentialization’ of the political executive proved a significant hesitation to reform. The executive, in the context of strong clientelistic relations, has maintained power through institutional design, policy instruments and, even, civil service professional development. In this way, social policies have remained distorted in the interests of particular target populations.

Social policy; administrative reforms; transition; clientelism; governance modes; Croatia

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