During the recent press conference on the 2023 results, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced that the Government needed greater flexibility and speed in making necessary political decisions. Therefore, reducing officials (and the relevant reduction of participants in the chain of draft law approval) intuitively seems a correct decision for taxpayers. Among other reasons, the need to improve the coordination quality between state bodies was mentioned. This is planned to be achieved through the compactness of ministries and strengthening of the so-called “Government Centre,” the idea of which is gradually being discussed by government officials and the expert environment.
Why did the Prime Minister announce this now?
The share of the population which still trusts the Government, has reduced twice over the past year. If 52% of respondents trusted the Government in December 2022, only 26% did so in December 2023.
A month ago, results of the monitoring report of the SIGMA Programme about the state of public management in Ukraine as of the end of 2023 were presented, which stated that the public management system “has major functions and procedures for policy shaping and coordination, including in the field of European integration (EI), but their actual implementation shall be strengthened in future.”
It was in the context of subsequent reform of the state management system that the Secretariat of the CMU announced the nearest plans: strengthening the Government centre, improving the interaction between the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada, as well as bringing the structure of the ministries office in order.
However, the government's announced plans were not the most critical, and the consequences of their implementation are by all means positive.
In the opinion of the Agency for Legislative Initiatives experts, the Government lacks communication and transparency in explaining its decisions. After all, in conditions where the results of a functional examination of the ministries in 2022 are confidential, salaries of officials are financed at the cost of international support in exchange for a significant list of reforms, it is important to explain to society how exactly decisions announced by the Prime Minister will improve the stability of the state office and ensure the positive influence of government policies on the quality of life of the citizens, their safety and well-being.
The list of problems noted by the Prime Minister is not exhaustive. Urgent and chronic problems of the state management system are the high turnover of the state officials (according to the 2023 results, the net outflow made up 6.8 thousand people), the lack of competitive selection for positions since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, as well as non-competitive and unbalanced remuneration for state officials, which negatively affects the quality of political decisions, the efficiency of bureaucratic processes and the effectiveness of policies. Their solution requires time and resources, which the Government lacks critically. Additional challenges for the state management system are the implementation of reforms within the framework of macro-financial support by the Ukraine Facility, as well as preparation for discussing and further implementing new requirements for EU membership, which will require much greater efforts and expertise of the Government in terms of Ukraine’s position on each direction of the negotiation framework.
What decisions of the Government will allow to raise the trust in it and the efficiency of governance in the near future?
1. Resuming competitive selection for state service positions and completing the introduction of the KPI system for state officials
The Government definitely needs “fresh blood” because the results of the initial self-screening regarding the possibility of joining the EU identified a significant gap in the ability to qualitatively and timely ensure due harmonisation of legislation and defend Ukraine’s interests during negotiations with European bureaucrats. Renewing merit-based rather than loyalty-based employment will help engage better expertise to prepare government decisions. At the same time, this actualises the issue of just and decent remuneration.
2. Ensuring a high-quality transition to the new remuneration system developed by the National Agency of Ukraine on Civil Service (NAUCS).
More than 160 thousand state and local government officials have been waiting for several years for the adoption of draft law No. 8222, which should regulate the new model of remuneration, which both SIGMA experts and the European Commission have been insisting on for many years. The limited capacity of the authorities and a lack of political will of the country’s top political management lead to an imbalance in the remuneration mechanism, further dismissal of state officials, and blurring of the institutional memory and capacity of the state authorities.
3. Leadership of the top political management regarding the full and comprehensive implementation of the state management reform in accordance with the Strategy until 2025, which has been approved by the Government.
It is not only Ukraine that the bureaucratic system is a holder of the conservative (administrative command) approach to solving social problems when the Government clarifies the norms of behaviour of the subjects in specific social relations by changing regulatory acts (game rules) and then controls their implementation. Good governance was identified by the European Commission in November 2023 as one of the five key priorities on the way to EU membership.
Therefore, the Government shall focus not on half-measures in the form of fast solutions to reduce ministries but on strengthening the ability for quality, result-oriented management that puts people and their needs at the centre of all policies. Otherwise, we will witness another collapse of the state management system, which was last observed in late 2019 – early 2020.
