Loose Coupling in Albania

Organisations must support the socially legitimated myth, but they also have to consider the political problems that are at the bottom of the coor­dination problem. And as the conformity to the myth is frequently at odds with political considerations, the ceremonial facade of coordination remains decoupled from the actual coordinating practice and diverges in response to more fundamental political issues.

Albania has not only been the least developed country in Europe since the fall of socialism, but its transition has also been marked by upheavals and political instability, culminating in the violent collapse of the state in 1997. In the wake of the turbulent 1990s, a host of IGOs and NGOs came to Albania to provide aid, enhance development, and rebuild the state. As the number of intervening international and regional organisa­tions has increased, so has the problem of coordination and so have the efforts to tackle the problem. As elsewhere, the result of these efforts has been bureaucratisation in the form of a Department of Strategy and Donor Coordination (DSDC) in November 2005. Being part of the Albanian state and with eight specialised coordinators, the department has been responsible for organising major donor coordination activities. Moreover, its task has been the implementation of an Integrated Planning System (IPS), whose main objective is the integration of all donor-assisted processes in the national planning and budgeting system and greater align­ment of external assistance with the strategic priorities of Albania’s gov­ernment. This structure is furthermore supported by the so-called Sector Working Groups. The groups concentrate on information exchange about ongoing projects but also focus on policy coordination issues, prioriti­sation of assistance, and monitoring of implementation.

The coordinating bureaucracy has fully incorporated the rationalised myth of coordination. Since its creation, the department has made con­tinual reference in all its documents and progress reports to the aims of alignment, harmonisation, and coordination as well as to the Declarations of Rome, Accra, and Buzan. The same applies to the international organ­isations, which also continue to uphold the ideal of coordination in their official documents and press releases. The coordinating department, according to its own evaluations, has brought about significant improve­ments in coordination in several areas. However, the empirical evidence suggests the persistence of political conflicts which remain unresolved and obviously hinder better country-level coordination.

This is especially evident with respect to the major international reform effort, which aims at the modernisation of the public administration. The public administration reform has been a key object of the donors. Since the late 1990s there has been a foreign drive to restructure the state adminis­tration, in which international actors such as the World Bank, the EU, the OSCE, the UNDP, USAID, and others were deeply involved. External assistance related to the development of strategies, the drafting of laws, human resources management, and technical assistance. The reform of the administration has been an objective across a very large number of donor projects (Republic of Albania 2008, 20; Elbasani 2013, 92). However, not much has improved in 15 years. While input to legislation and civil service training still mostly depends on international assistance, the state bureaucracy continues to function in a patrimonial manner (Hensell 2009, 128-62; Elbasani 2013). The public administration remains heavily politi­cised at all levels and is subject to widespread party patronage, corruption, weak enforcement of rules, and lack of accountability.

Despite the persistent failure of the externally supported public admin­istration reform, the international and national organisations continue to highlight their successful coordination in achieving these reforms, to which the political class itself is only paying lip service. For instance, the World Bank claims that ‘(t)he IPS exercise is a very good example of donor coordination but, more importantly, it has been an excellent example of Government ownership and leadership in a number of public sector reforms’ (World Bank 2012). At the same time, the DSDC high­lights the alignment of the donors to the governmental priority of Public Administration Reform (DSDC 2011, 19, 64).

The rhetorical commitment to coordination, however, is only loosely coupled to its actual practice. This can be illustrated with the respective Sector Working Group, which is part of the coordinating bureaucracy and brings together donors and government representatives working on the reform of the public administration. Although administrative reform is a priority aim according to all official statements, this group has met only very erratically: once in 2008, three times in 2011, and once in 2012, while having a complete break in 2009 and 2010.⁷ Another indicator for loose coupling is the donors’ hesitant use of the Albanian public finan­cial management and procurements systems. Despite the commitment to improve coordination in this area through using ‘partner’ countries’ institutions, donors are very reluctant to rely on the planning and bud­geting processes of their host country (OECD 2011b, 2). The continu­ing patrimonialisation of the state apparatus and the resulting failure of administration reforms are, at least in part, the cause for the actual lack of an effective donor-to-government coordination in the realm of public sec­tor reform. The persistent ‘policy slippage’, however, is denied, while the commitment to coordination is carried forward and all actors collusively reproduce the vocabulary of ‘alignment’ and ‘partnership’.