Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview JCPA Workshop Author(s) Jelena Ruso Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade Belgrade Serbia Filipovic Jovan, Title A Comparative Framework for Studying the Policy-Making in the EU Pre - and Post - Accession CEE Countries: The Case of Quality Infrastructure Policy Making in Serbia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract In order to build a common platform for studying policy making in some particular fields in the EU Pre - and Post – Accession CEE Countries we developed a framework for a comparative analysis of Policy-Making in these countries. This framework, based on the results of an extensive literature research, has served as a valuable tool to apply, in this way, created generalized knowledge and experience to some particular areas, such as quality infrastructure. The framework rests on three key propositions concerning policy-making in the EU Pre - and Post - Accession CEE Countries. These are that policy-making in these countries is strongly influenced by the existing EU policies and legislation; that these processes require a specific level of dedication, experience, knowledge and expertise of the policy-makers and that time pressure is a constraint to successful policy-making projects. Failure to properly understand these propositions can have a number of unintended and highly impactful consequences. Such outcomes in the post-accession period are recognized as ‘shallow Europeanization’, ‘world of dead letter’ or ‘Potemkin harmonization’, which are characterized by formal rules on the one hand, and informal practices on the other. During the accession period, uncritical and mechanical law adoption with a fast-track procedure and lack of knowledge, experience or expertise on the part of policy-makers are usually identified as causes of ‘Euroscepticism’. Although the common problems of the transposition of EU legislation in CEE countries are widely studied, our knowledge is still limited about how public policy-makers perceive quality infrastructure issues in Serbia during the EU pre-accession process. Quality infrastructure refers to all aspects of metrology, standardization, testing, quality management, certification and accreditation that have a bearing on conformity assessment. As such, an adequate national quality infrastructure (NQI) is an important precondition for developing countries to have access to international markets. Aiming to start filling this gap, we employ a triangulation methodology (the framework developed in the study, content analysis of 226 parliamentary speeches and a survey among 502 quality management experts) to come up with the same answer to a single theoretical question. Special focus was placed on harmonization of Serbian QI legislation with that of the EU. The results show that policy-makers are not fully familiar with NQI concepts and that they use them in an inadequate way, often solely for marketing purposes. Regardless of the lack of specialized knowledge and expertise, policy-makers seldom rely on the experts' opinion. Furthermore, the general conclusion is that the NQI legislation is uncritically transferred from the EU which has direct implications on well-being and growth and particularly consumer protection, health, safety and environment.
