INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS IN HUNGARY’S DECONCENTRATED STATE ADMINISTRATION

Many countries have been delegating a diverse set of tasks to mid-level public administration and typically deconcentrated bodies of state administration. Deconcentration is a dominant principle of Hungarian public administration as well. The evolution and latest innovations of Hungarian deconcentrated (or territorial) state administration is best understood by summarizing some specialities of its pre-Transition and post-Transition history.After the Democratic Transformation of Hungary, there was a longer period in which there was no linear, unbroken development path for territorial state administration, instead occasionally, substantial paradigm shifts in this sub-system. But in the last decade Hungarian legislation mainly aspired to better reflect the will of the central government on the territorial level – this could have been done best via the deconcentrated bodies of state administration.In my opinion the gist of deconcentrated state administration is to convert the central will of government to the lower level of administration. Following the wide-scale structural merges and reorganization in the last 10 years, territorial state administration has been reformed into a system that proved to be a Hungarian specialty. In this study, I am going to summarize some cornerstones and major findings, in accordance with the recent administrative developments and innovations.