Today, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government has received a special award from ReSPA (Regional School of Public Administration) in 2022 for the implementation of the First Student Professional Practice in Public Administration Fair, which was held last year on a digital platform and in a virtual environment, at which 18 public administration bodies, in cooperation with five state universities, offered professional practice for 400 students.
ReSPA, with the support of OSCE/SIGMA, has organized today the Western Balkans Ministerial Conference on Public Administration Reform in Skopje, at which the State Secretary of MDULS, Maja Mačužić Puzić, had made her address on behalf of MDULS and the Minister Marija Obradović.
In her address, she had highlighted the results achieved so far, but also the set future goals, defined by the strategic framework of the Public Administration Reform in Serbia, with a special emphasis on the reform of the local self-government system.
“The Republic of Serbia is committed to the improvement of all key aspects that make the administration responsible, transparent, efficient and ‘tailored to its citizens’, which is also the vision of the PAR Strategy for the period 2021-2030. It is extremely important that our new Strategy places the reform of the local self-government system among its key priorities, because the administration is only as ‘good’ as its ‘first line’ for the citizens, it precisely consisting of local self-governments,” Mačužić Puzić has said.
She has stated that Serbia has the PAR Strategy as an umbrella document which includes three Action Plans in the field of human resource management, service provision and accountability and transparency, as well as three programmes in the field of planning and coordination of public policies, public financial management and reform of the local self-government system. .
Confirmation of the efforts made and the results achieved can be found in the SIGMA/OECD Report on the Implementation of the Principles of Public Administration from 2021, which identifies Serbia’s progress in almost all areas covered by the Public Administration Reform, especially in the area of service provision, and also states that Serbia is above the regional average in other areas as well. As a particularly important progress, the State Secretary had highlighted the adoption of the Programme for the Reform of the Local Self-Government System in the Republic of Serbia for the period 2021-2025, as the first public policy document in this field. She has added that MDULS is dedicated to improving the capacity of local self-governments in providing services to the citizens through the establishment of One-Stop-Shops (OSS), of which there will be more than 40 by the end of this year, encouraging and investing in the development of inter-municipal cooperation, and improving the participation of citizens in the affairs of the local self-government, all of which resulted in progress in applying the principles of good governance at the local level.
“Progress in the field of service provision perhaps sublimates, in the best way imaginable, all our efforts to transform the administration from a regulator into a service for citizens, which is our ultimate goal,” Mačužić Puzić has concluded.
The ReSPA Ministerial Conference brought together the relevant ministers of the Western Balkans region, key actors in Public Administration Reform and representatives of the European Commission, who have exchanged opinions on the future of Public Administration Reform, focused on the services that public administration provides to citizens, but also on the digitization process which should contribute to the transformation of the society as a whole and create a favourable business environment.
The message of today’s conference is that the dialogue on Public Administration Reform at such a high level provides new ideas for creating a more open, efficient and reliable public administration in the Western Balkans region.
