Assessing strategic policy transfer in Romanian Public Management

The notion of strategic policy transfer builds upon existing accounts of policy transfer that assume selectivity in terms of what governments choose to learn from abroad. This article analyses the case of public administration in Romania, which, at first glance, appears to have embraced policy transfer as part of the process of Europeanisation and other modernisation initiatives emanating from international institutions such as the World Bank. Based on interviews with policy elites in Romania, the authors establish that those elites were not interested in learning about administrative improvements from abroad because they were self-evidently workable but because it satisfied key external actors. Furthermore, the high degree of politicisation of the Romanian bureaucracy, which remains a legacy of its Communist past, continues to act as a barrier to change, and may result in the reversal of reforms now EU membership is fully established.