Abstract
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Croatia is a small county in South-Eastern Europe. She is a unitary state with a more than 90 percent of declared Roman Catholic and Croats. Croatia is also member state of European Union. Their local government is organized in two tier system with a polytypic structure. On the first level are cities and municipalities with municipality or city mayors. On the second level are counties with county prefects. First level is aimed as politic units which are concerned about typical communal problems like waste management, water supplies management, maintenance and management of local roads, organization of local transport system, social housing, urban planning, etc. On the second level are counties, which are charged for coordination of urban planning of local units from the first level and support for managing of local tasks and duties of local units from the first level. But responsobilities, tasks and obligations of the second level of local self-government are not so cleared defined, and we have overlap between these two levels of self-government units. Many of Croatian scientists and practitioners mean that Croatia needs a reform of local self-government system. There a two possible field which are being considered for a reform. First are counties, and second are neighbourhoods. Counties are not completely defined local government units and needs reform which are including fiscal, administrative and political decentralization. Second are neighbourhoods, as a type of sub-local units, which are existing in Croatian statute law, but they haven’t any officially public authorities. Many of Croatian scientists and practitioners think that the role of neighbourhoods must be more visible, especially in some future process of decentralisation and strengthening of local political institutions in the future. Second thing, experience in Croatia is a important for the development of local self-government in other states of south-east Europe, and especially for development of decentralisation processes, which include political, fiscal and administrative dimension. This paper would be analyse present processes in reform of local self-government in Croatia, and possible other process of reform of this field in the future, regarding a local reforms managing in the other neighbourhood state like a Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, etc. The main thesis of this paper is that decentralization process in local self-government can help and improve further democratisation and transparency in public administration. This paper aims to explore the possible ways of this process in Croatia, and development and strengthening of democratization process on the local government level.
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