ABSTRACT
Many different organizations supply ideas for public administration reforms. In a European context, the OECD has been an influential carrier of ideas and models. Academia, especially the management discipline, has played a key role in supplying nation states with the latest in terms of control, accounting, and human resource management. Consultants of different kinds have been active. As the European Union wanted the candidate states to meet the Copenhagen criteria, it tried various ways to stimulate administrative system reforms in those states. However, this is a field where the EU has no coercive power. Even though the EU wanted these states to transform, it could not mandate any specific administrative arrangements for its members or potential members; in this area, softer forms of governance must be exercised. In this chapter, we will describe the main meditative and inquisitive activities used in the pre-accession attempts to modernize the public administrations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The chapter focuses on discussions among experts. We have collected and summarized what has been written about these states by international organizations, researchers, consultants, and other experts in the form of official documents, country reports, research papers, etc. This chapter examines what people mean when they talk about administrative reforms. What is reported in the writings we examined may of course mainly reflect taken-for-granted ideas about Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. However, we also believe that this written discourse at least somewhat reflects some of the changes that actually took place in these states. Regaining independence meant opening up to the international environment. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia strove to westernize and modernize. In this process, they all became subject to strong external influences and they all attempted to reform their public administrations. The first civil service laws in the three countries were adopted in the mid-1990s and have been followed by frequent legislative action and amendments. As we shall see, these three states put great effort into trying to adapt to the legal framework of the EU and to the Copenhagen criteria. The stories told about the modernization of the public administrations of the Baltic states often stress the similarities of the adaptations made. The transformation is often described as taking place in a similar way in all three states. However, there is another side to the story, and the
adaptation processes have also been described as following somewhat different paths. In this chapter, we will consider how post-1991 changes in state administration in the three Baltic states have been accounted for. According to ongoing discussions, Estonia tried early on for “a clean break with the past,” and has subsequently been a devoted follower of ideas connected with the new public management (NPM) movement. Estonia also put considerable energy and resources into image-making, presenting itself as a liberal state. Latvia and Lithuania were more reluctant to embrace NPM reforms, and enthusiasm for reform in these countries varied greatly from 1991 onwards. In both these countries, administrative capacity was lacking and there were serious problems implementing rules. However, even though transformation in Latvia was discontinuous and Lithuania was initially less eager to reform rapidly, all three countries gradually came to be heavily influenced by NPM ideas. In the following, we will discuss how transformations in the three Baltic states have been described, starting with Lithuania.
