The statement on BiH’s EU integration recently approved by BiH’s political leadership pledges “reforms necessary in order to establish institutional functionality and efficiency at all levels of government.” To meet this commitment, BiH will have to confront what the International Crisis Group calls its “zombie administration”: the scores of expensive, ineffectual, and often useless BiH-level agencies created through BiH’s involuntary and unconstitutional centralization. In the years following the Dayton Accords, the High Representative forced the centralization of a wide range of functions in defiance of BiH’s Dayton Constitution, which reserves all but a few competences to the Entities. As the Crisis Group has written, “High Representative Paddy Ashdown imposed laws creating vast new powers of the state, sometimes at entity expense. During his tenure, Bosnian leaders established many more state bodies and powers as unconstitutional departures from Dayton, but the Constitutional Court upheld them.”
Leaving aside the unconstitutionality of the centralized agencies and the illegitimacy of the edicts and coercion by which they were created, it has long been clear that centralization has weighed BiH down with costly and ineffective bureaucracy. The Crisis Group wrote that a “pattern of internationally-sponsored state building without local buy-in has recurred repeatedly. It produced a ‘flood’ of new agencies, many of which set up offices and hired staff but lacked clear tasks, so did little or nothing.”
The Crisis Group further wrote:
A minister from a party traditionally in favor of building state-level institutions said there are about twenty “useless” state agencies: “we have no idea what they do, but we cannot say that in public”. Some state bodies perform worse than the entity institutions they replaced; a prominent businessman complained an agricultural export project went nowhere because the BiH Veterinary Office never issued permits.
The result is a zombie administration, providing full employment for civil servants but few services to citizens. . . . Agencies proliferate and perform badly or not at all but view criticism as an attempt to subvert their independence.
BiH agencies also often violate international standards of transparency and accountability.
In order to address these problems, there must first be a thorough examination of centralized BiH-level institutions. For this purpose, an assessment committee, including representatives of the Entities, BiH, and the EU, should be established. The committee would assess the need for—or redundancy of—each such institution, as well as its efficiency, transparency, and justification of expenditures. Based on the results of these assessments, BiH could eliminate wasteful and ineffective BiH-level agencies and return their functions to the Entities.
Entity agencies will be closer and more accountable to the people they serve, easier to reform, and less susceptible to the political deadlocks that are inherent at the BiH level, given the deep political differences between the electorates of the two Entities.
BiH must reckon with the failure of forced centralization and begin shedding the burden of its poorly performing agencies.
