An Eastern European View on Great Power Politics. Egmont Commentary, 23 August 2018

Last July’s meeting in Helsinki between Presidents Trump and Putin greatly concerned the states of Eastern Europe. Helsinki is a highly symbolic venue for them, since this is where the CSCE Final Act was signed in 1975. The principal gain that the USSR claimed back then was the recognition of post-Second World War borders, while the advantage that the West claimed was the acknowledgement of human rights. Some argue that the latter was so important that it led to the defeat of USSR – an event that Putin considers to be the worst geopolitical catastrophe in Russian history

Retrospective analysis of the EU resilience to a large-scale migration

ABSTRACT The migration issue raises lots of questions regarding the resilience of the EU in front of such large-scale migration. This paper is the introductory part of larger research project that has in view to analyze the EU and some of the national strategic documents in order to detect when and how the migration as a security risk showed up and to clarify if it is a objective risk for EU security or it is just a tool of negotiation. The large-scale migration is a wicked problem that needs a foresight exercise not only to better understand the issue of migration but also to assess Emergency Preparedness of the EU and to prepare a long term strategy or scenarios, with regard to the way the current migration waves will impact the current European architecture. We propose to design a classical Delphi study, as basis for the above-mentioned exercise

Public Innovation in Post-Transition Countries: Experiences from Brazil and Romania

We compare two cases of innovation in public services in Brazil and Romania, aiming to illustrate the connection between innovation, modernization, and path-dependence. One case is the Brazilian Pathway School Program, and the second is the Romanian School Bus Pro­gram. Both countries experienced periods of transition, which we considered fruitful for his­torical analysis. We based our investigation on two comparative case studies, using secondary data and employing document analysis and pre­vious researches’ reports. While Brazilian Path­way School Program proved to be a successful story of designing a centralized policy, Romania walked in the opposite direction, from a central­ized state, under the communist rule, to a polity where innovation occurs at the intersection be­tween local community and central government. In Romania, it would be difficult to perceive the contingencies of local engagement in a country where civil liberty was suspended for 42 years. In Brazil, the inquiry was connected to the atypical federation, where the subnational states devel­oped an extraordinary economic and budgetary dependence on the Union.</p

Romanian public administration reform 2.0: using innovative foresight methodologies to engage stakeholders and the public

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.</p