Strategic Management Process in Romania’s Central Public Administration

The role of strategic management is uncontestable in literature and in practice. Strategic management practices have been widely undertaken in all developed countries, and its benefits have been shown in all the cases. In Romania, under EU and other international donors’ pressure, strategic management and planning was mentioned as successful conditions for the public administration reform process since 2001. The aim of this paper is to explore the strategic management process in Romanian public administration and to investigate reform initiatives of the Romanian Governement in order to enhance its strategic management capacity. The methodology of this research consists in literature review, content analysis of legal framework and reform strategies between 1999- 2020. An analysis of General Secretariat of Romania’s Government, Central Unit for Public Administration Reform and EU and World Bank ‘studies and reports were also carried out. The empirical data of this research are also collected through a series of discussions with top – decision-makers of public administration reform during the time. In this reserarch we find out that there are several regulations, guides and methodological norms for the strategic planning and management process in Romania at national and ministers’ level but, although the legal framework and institutions are largely in place in Romania to support effective policy management, the execution of strategic and policies documents remains inadequately. This is the reason that consolidation of strategic planning process has yet figured as reform objective of the curent strategy of consolidation of Public Administration Capacity 2014-2020. In the end, we drew some reccomendations to enhance strategic management capacity of Central Public Administration.