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Suggestions for local and regional self-government reform in Croatia
Ivan Koprić
orcid.org/0000-0002-9086-6937
; full professor of Administrative Science, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, and president of the Institute of Public Ad- ministration, Zagreb)
Abstract
The paper begins with a comment on the sequence of previous attempts at decentralisation and a description of current efforts made concerning the decentralisation process. Fourteen suggestions for substantive decentralisation are elaborated. A substantive decentralisation is the only reasonable decentralisation form if local and regional self-government is to be constituted as one of the key actors of economic and social development, and of economic stability of the country. These fourteen sugges-
tions include: (1) designing a decentralisation strategy; (2) strengthening the structure for regional development; (3) maintaining the two-tier system of territorial self-government, which should nevertheless differ from the existing model; (4) forming five regions instead of the existing twenty
counties; (5) merging more than 550 local units into 150 large municipalities; (6) maintaining and strengthening forms of intra-municipal self-government; (7) reshaping counties into state administrative units with the implementation of one-stop-shop principle, by reducing them to ten units and by widening their competences to the tasks of the existing branch of-
fices of various ministries; (8) strengthening the financial capacity of local self-government so as to rise the share of local expenditures in the general state expenditures to 25 per cent in the next five years; (9) considering the introduction of mixed electoral system, so as to introduce plurality representation along with proportional; (10) establishing an Agency for Local Civil Servants as a central level independent body; (11) establishing
an integrated information system on local governments; (12) transferring certain state administrative tasks to larger local self-government units; (13) forming an group of experts that would professionaly prepare decentralisation; (14) planning decentralisation so that the whole programme will have been finished by 2017 local elections. The author has also made suggestions for the another scenario – improvement of the existing cen-
tralised model of state organisation, primarily via deeper differentiation between the objectively different local units, and stimulation and imposition of intermunicipal cooperation.
Keywords
local and regional self-government – Croatia; development; decentralisation; centralised and decentralised state organisation; territorial structure
Hrčak ID:
135285
URI
Publication date:
7.12.2010.
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