Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Politico-Administrative Relations Author(s) Gabriele Burbulyte-Tsiskarishvili Klaipeda University Klaipeda Lithuania Title Implementing governance in politico-administrative relations: the case of Lithuania File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Governance has become a very broadly used term recently meaning the stronger interdependence among different institutions, covering the non-state actors as well. Usually it implies two important levels of the world political processes that are supposed to be the most powerful non-state actors – i.e. the local and the global. The processes of the EU integration, however, made possible to connect this new dimension with the national state government system. Traditional politico-administrative relations were challenged very deeply. They had to accede to the supra-national political and administration systems of the EU. Pressure from the sub-national actors and institutions became stronger as never before as well. The process might be the logic sequence of the development for the mature Western democracies. The East and Central European countries, however, face lots of difficulties while implementing the new dimension of governance. Lithuania is a good example of the problems that accompany country during integration into the EU. As the notion of governance implies the cooperation of many different actors and institutions, the empirical research of Lithuania’s governmental development shows how differently and even awry this cooperation is understood. The main institutions that clash in the processes of national governance are President, PM, and the Cabinet. However, namely the institutions of President and PM sometimes try to duplicate each others authority. It has a very strong influence upon senior administration. and unbalances the politico-administrative relations by making administration over-politicized. Therefore paper deals with all these issues as following: The first part is dedicated for the brief review of the main governance institutions, their development. E.g. until the adoption of the new Constitution in 1992, great debates twisted around the question which regime – presidential (as in the pre-war years) or parliamental (as in many Western democracies) – to choose. The semi-presidential model was chosen. Nonetheless, in 1998 the Constitutional court explained that according to the Constitution, Lithuania is a parliamental country with the expanded powers of the President. The second part analyses institutional powers and authority in politico-administrative relations, namely the core executive and the senior administration relations during the integration process into the EU. Some sharpest examples of the clash could be seen in the PM’s efforts to establish advisory bodies resembling institutions that belong to the President’s authority (thus trying to control the executives who were appointed by the different political stream); a few reasons of the former president’s impeachment lurked in his efforts not only to affect the work of bureaucracy – he tried to establish an institution duplicating the powers of local governance; despite that the President, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is responsible for the country’s foreign policy, institution that coordinated all the EU integration process belonged to the Cabinet (interesting, that in 1996 – 1998 there functioned the Ministry of European Affairs), right now this institution is demolished, all the powers concerning the EU issues are distributed for three ministries, though almost every governance institution has a department for the European issues; etc. The third part concludes the research by highlighting the main obstacles for the dimension of governance in Lithuania.
