Abstract
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Despite lasting for the last decade attempts and reforms of local government aiming at decentralization and empowering local authorities, Kyrgyzstan is still regarded as pretty centralized country with the strong presidency power, but a weak central government and a weak local level. The term “local level” is subdivided between an intermediate level (oblast and rayon) and local government at the city and the village level . The intermediate level is actually a local state administration represented by the oblast governor (7 in total) and rayon akims appointed by the President (40 in total). The city local government is presented by 27 cities – 2 cities of the republican significance, 10 cities of oblast significance and 13 cities of rayon significance . The mayors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the local councils. Confirmation of the local council requires formal agreement of the governor and akims. The village government (aiyl-okmotu) is presented by 472 elected AO heads and 6818 elected councillors.
In the administrative system of Kyrgyzstan the local (subnational) level has only powers specifically delegated by the central government. The local level is designed in a way to allow implementation of decisions made by the President Administration and the central government. Deliver of services for the direct benefit of local population is not the primary task of the local level; however it allows avoiding direct involvement of the central government into service provision, thus shifting focuses for non-provision to the local level. However, if elected body is not able, no matter what reasons are, to provide services, it can hardly be called local government .
Appointed mayors have dual personal loyalties, and typically are less responsive to local needs. Directly elected AO heads should have had the strongest degree of autonomy, derived form the personal electoral mandate. However, they also depend a lot on the LSA and report to it for execution of the President and government resolutions, resolution of ministries, and for functions shared with the state. This system resembles the old soviet management style, which cascades decision-making down the system . There are a lot of discussions about necessity of intermediate level. There is an opinion expressed by international community and LSG leadership that “existence of local state administration and a strong central government is a real obstacle for further development of LSG system in Kyrgyzstan that prevent LSG from being independent and autonomy”. Others think that such discussions are of no use because for our environment with ethnic division, they might threaten the unity of a fragile state. Although there is an alternative view that municipalities with a life of their own can smooth out such threats .
Many people consider that the present system represented by ministries, oblast, rayon and LSG is too heavy and should be replaced by 2 or 3 levels. The basic assumption is that abolishment of intermediate levels will ease the LSG from their clutch.
Many countries have a two-tier system of LSG – communities at a lower level and provinces at a higher level. But it should be taken into consideration that in central Europe this democratization of the district or rayon level took about 12 years. The analysis given below justifies that without reconsideration of the LSA role it won’t be efficient to amalgamate LSG. Cities are clearly able to perform a wider range of functions (10-13) than a small village government (3-4). Thus, cities should retain broadly their existing functions. The role of rayon could be changed – providing services to small villages, thus gradually be converted into the top-tier of a local government system.
Small scale of village governments (AO) is a real bottleneck problem that stems root for other problems -fiscal decentralization. The LSG as stipulated by the law on Financial Economic Bases of LSG “has the right to solve the issues of recruiting staff and payment the staff salary if they can generate their own sources of funding”. The question is how can small scale municipalities generate revenues? As a rule, citizens in such small scale municipalities have a small plot of land; they are self-employed working on farms, at subsistence level. Therefore they can not pay any taxes except land taxes that is depend on size of a plot of land.
For the Ministry of Finance and Treasury it seems impossible to disperse money amongst 472 AO and secure control over efficient usage of the state budget. The Ministry official dealing with LSG finance shared his opinion saying: “after a year or two of fiscal decentralization reforms we’ll come back to the initial system”
In 2006 the ad hoc working group was established in the government to develop policy and recommendations aimed at enlargement of existing settlements thus allowing implementing a two-tier budgetary system starting January 2007. The outcome of the ad hoc working group has not been published or publicly discussed . In 2007 the committee was established in the President Administration to deal with the same issue. The deputy director of the National Agency on LSG in the meeting mentioned that “there are proposals to replace oblasts and rayons with Aimaks”. The President at the meeting with Chui oblast citizens in October 2007 mentioned that 30 proposals have been submitted to the committee researching the issues of territorial administrative change. All those efforts of top official are unknown to citizens and LSG due to non-exposure of information to public.
Recently, the Danish government published a study comparing its performance in providing a range of public services to its citizens with 10 other European countries that have similar level of economic wealth. And this study draws our attention to very interesting phenomenon - how differently public services such as health, housing and education are provided in the various countries of the European Union despite their similarity. In some cases the state is dominant; in others local government, churches or non-profit organisations have important roles; in some cases the private sector has a role.
This is because different countries have different values, which have been cultivated in different ways. This is because the history of European local government appeared and developed 50 years ago. Different societies have learned to trust different groups in very different ways. Some European countries trust their civil servants, others don’t trust. Some countries have grown with expectation from local government or non-profit organisations to deliver bulk of vital public services. Some countries have a strong body of opinion that government (national or local) should not be providing services directly, but rather contracting them out to the private sector or NGO. Each country’s history has given different strengths to the power of the central government and the power of the local government. The Swiss system is at one edge of the rope with the restricted powers of the state. Historically the state is a relative newcomer in countries such as Italy and Germany and this gives local government certain advantages. In countries such as UK and France, the state is much stronger, and the constitutional position of local government weaker. If we look at the experience of the countries like Romania, Check and Slovak they are moving towards strong local government that co-exists with a strong local state administration.
At present the issue of a strong central government and a weak local government is a current Public Management Reform agenda that was articulated in the Kyrgyzstan Country Development Strategy for 2006-2020.
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