The NISPAcee Working Group met in Ljubljana to discuss the relationship of executive capacity and regulatory quality in Central and Eastern Europe. Regulatory quality characterizes legal regulations that are knowledge-based, consider policy externalities and interdependencies and represent a longer-term perspective. The debates of the Working Group sessions confirmed that the organization of executives is a crucial variable for the quality of regulations. However, the papers presented in Ljubljana also indicated how difficult it is to enable governments to produce high-quality regulations.
New Public Management ideas do not provide a panacea as the behavioural and cultural assumptions underlying these ideas may be fundamentally challenged on the basis of a critical theory approach that transcends the paradigm of instrumental rationality. Improving the knowledge basis, technical sophistication and power resources of executives will not ensure high-quality regulations if the accountability-generating functions of extra-governmental actors are neglected.

The empirical case studies of the workshop documented the gap between legal design and legalist reforms on the one hand, patterns of de-facto interactions and incentives on the other. Attempts to establish a more policy-oriented preparation of proposals for cabinet meetings in Romania may fail as they presuppose civil servants thinking strategically and the necessary incentive space conceded by politicians to such civil servants. The difficulty of changing mindsets and habits were also manifested by a Romanian opinion survey that found an awareness gap between civil servants committed to reform and the general civil service.
European Union expectations and requirements have driven central government and legislative reforms in many countries of the region. The impact of this constellation has been ambivalent: a paper on Bulgaria noted the persistent deficiencies in policy performance, and a paper on Slovakia documented the shift towards a predominance of the executive and government-sponsored bills. Even a pioneer of executive reform like Hungary today faces institutional obstacles in coping with challenges of globalization and economic policy. One conclusion that emerged from the debate is that procedural and organizational reforms need to be embedded in a human resource management policy and backed by a broad political support coalition