Challenges of Public Administration Reform in Serbia: Between Requirements and Reality

Abstract:Informal systemic practices in Serbia embedded in the political and administrative milieu impair public administration reform efforts. Formal rules produce no real incentives for achieving effective reform outcomes and suppressing these informalities. External conditionality provides incentives as it puts pressure on institutional actors to pursue reforms, promising the often vague but important prospect of European Union membership. Although effective in initiating change in formal procedures, external incentives still fall short of deconstructing informal practices that circumvent written norms and standards, despite pressures and conditionality. In this paper, the authors argue that parallelism between formal rules that exist on paper, and reality, which is resistant to these same rules, results in a "reform faking" syndrome characterized by the acceptance of formal standards that the system finds difficult to absorb, despite internal and external demands to apply them. The paper goes on to argue that the embedded practice of fabricating reforms carries long-term consequences for system stability and the rule of law.