DIVISION OF FUNCTIONS WITHIN ROMANIA’S CENTRE OF GOVERNMENT: A LONG HISTORY OF REFORMS

After the fall of communist regime in Romania, the structure of Romania’s Government Working Apparatus (the Government Office) was subject to several reforms trying to establish an adequate role for each of the entities. Although the composition of the Government Working Apparatus may vary, its central piece is the General Secretariat of the Government (GSG), which, in governments with a strong prime minister, has tried to share power with the Prime Minister’s Chancellery. The aim of this paper is to explore the evolution of the reforms of the Government’s Working Apparatus (Government Office) in Romania after 2001 and how the functions between the General Secretariat of Government and the Prime Minister’s Chancellery are divided after the recent reforms within the Centre of Government in order to assure a better coordination. The methodology of this paper consists in a content analysis of the legal framework, public administration reform strategies, technical reports of some projects conducted by the General Secretariat of Romania’s Government and World Bank’s studies and reports. This paper reports aspects on a longitudinal study between 2001-2021, which set out to examine and evaluate the roles of different organisational structure within Romania’s Government Office. The empirical data of this paper were also collected through a series of discussions with top public policy makers in charge with reform of central public administration. The General Secretariat of the Government (GSG) has always possessed a central role in the structure of the Government Office, its part being to assure the technical and strategic operations regarding Government acts and to solve the organisational, judicial, economic, and technical problems of Government and prime-minister’s activity, also the representation of the Government in the justice. GSG is the element of connection and stability of governance that assures the framework for decision making process. Recently, in February 2020, the Orban Government has approved two government decisions by which both the Prime Minister’s Chancellery and the General Secretariat of the Government have been reorganised. Both measures were part of the priorities of the Government Program, namely improving the efficiency of public administration, aiming at reforming the Centre of Government. Thus, the functions of the two structures were better defined and delimited, in the sense that the General Secretariat of the Government was to provide the technical / administrative secretariat of the Government, while the Chancellery would have the role of strategic coordination. In this sense, within the Chancellery operated the Centre for Analysis and Strategy and the Independent Scientific Council, while subordinated to the General Secretariat of the Government were the institutions which were to provide data and information to the Chancellery for analysis and studies that would underpin public policy programs. The essential role of the Chancellery thus became to coordinate the ministries in the process of elaboration and monitoring of the institutional strategic plans, to approve the governmental strategies, precisely to ensure the correlation of these strategies, as well as to correlate the elaboration, implementation and monitoring of public policies. Unfortunately, this reform was implemented only for a short period of time and nowadays, in January 2021, when a new prime-minister has come, the role of the Chancellery was diminished once again. Its role was focused on communication and relation with media and on the coordination, at the level of the Government Office, of the reform process regarding public administration and relation with civil society and social partners.