E-Counselling on Regulations and Planning Documents on Public Archival Service in Croatia: The Analysis of Participants

Abstract

Counsellings with the public are in the Croatian context a relatively new instrument of public participation in legislating regulations and other general acts whose characteristics and effects have not been scientifically researched in practice to a greater extent. The aim of the paper is to contribute to these perceptions by the elaboration of a subject i.e. analysing the participants of e-counsellings on regulations and planning documents that concern organizing and performance of the public archival service in Croatia. The subject is suited for a complete elaboration, since in the period from 2017 to 2020 the competent Ministry of Culture (renamed in July 2020 Ministry of Culture and Media) had carried out counsellings via the central internet portal on 8 such legal acts (two laws, five ordinances and one planning document). Apart from the new ordinance on registers and other official archival documentation that has yet to be regulated, this constitutes a comprehensive normative and planning framework of the public archival service coordinated with changes in the surroundings where public archives work. T he data had been gathered by the method of quantitative analysing of the content of individual reports on conducted counsellings available on e-Counselling portal, as well as additional documents. The Data on the number and structure of participants (natural persons, various categories of corporations) and amount of comments they sent (in total and for each e-counselling) are interpreted as an important indicator of the public interest for the public archival service i.e. the work of the state archives who are intrusted with performing it. On the other hand, the participation of individual professional archival societies, state archives and their administrative and professional employees on e-counsellings is interpreted as the indicator of interest for strengthening of normative infrastructure pertaining to their own service. The total of 412 comments was sent to the analysed e-counsellings, submitted by 56 participants. Since individual procedure of e-counselling is conducted for each legal act, the same natural person or corporation can appear as a participant in several counsellings. Therefore, in the total number of 56 participants individual natural persons or corporations were counted more than once, depending on the number of e-counsellings they participated in. Further analysis established that 40 different natural persons and corporations participated in e-counsellings. The largest number of participants, as far as 30 or 75 %, participated in just one e-counselling. Six participants took part in two counsellings (15 %), whereas three counsellings had three participants (7.5 %). Four counsellings had no participants, whereas only one person (2.5 %) took part in five of them, which is also the largest number of noted participations by the same participant. Research results further show that from the total of 40 various participants of e-counsellings 30 of them are natural persons and only 10 corporations. In the process, the natural persons had 43 and the corporations 13 participations. The same number of persons from the professional archival community (administrative and professional employees in archives, state archives and professional archival associations) and persons from social environment i.e. interested public in the broad sense participated in e-counsellings. The former comprises of 21 participants and the latter has 19 of them. The biggest difference between the two groups concerns the number of participations. The professional archival community had 35, whereas other interested public 21 participations. T he presented results indicate a rather low level of interest of the general public, as well as the professional archival community, for the normative infrastructure of the public archival service. This conclusion is supported by the comparison of the number of participants from both groups with other relevant data, such as the number of creators of documental and archival records under the jurisdiction of state archives i.e. the number of employees in state archives. The authorised ministry and state archives should use this as the basis for re-examination of the current approach in implementing e-counsellings i.e. encourage them to further motivate the professional community and the general public to participate in this segment of their work. The lower turnout can certainly be put into context of influences of the e-counsellings that had so far taken place, regarding the formation of the final proposals of legal acts in terms of the level of acceptance of the sent suggestions (comments). Analysis of this segment, including the content and types of comments (without arguments, with arguments, technical, professional etc.), is only pointed out in this paper as a subject that warrants separate research.