A reflection on the recently adopted Government conclusions on strengthening administrative capacities in the period 2025–2026:
Is our bar really so low that we need a plan just to obey the law?
In Montenegro, the number of employees in public administration, education, health care, defense, and social services per 100,000 inhabitants is 2.7 times higher than the average in the European Union (EU). Our Government shared this information—albeit very indirectly—while noting that the figures vary from country to country and that the indicator is difficult to measure, since there is no uniform definition or coverage of the public sector across all states. Indeed, the data could look even worse for Montenegro if the Government had ever counted employees in public enterprises.
Which, of course, it hasn’t.
We might be tempted to think that this isn’t such a bad sign—that perhaps it means our efficiency, range of services, and user experience are at least 2.7 times better. Yet we all know that’s not the case. And so does our Government, since it is also aware that the World Bank’s Government Effectiveness Indicator shows Montenegro performing significantly worse than EU countries.
All of this is just another way of restating a well-known fact: we have a cumbersome bureaucracy. The real problem is that, after every such realization, what usually follows is: nothing.
That “nothing” was perfectly deconstructed by the State Audit Institution (SAI) in its Report on the Efficiency of Establishing an Optimal Administration in the Process of Public Administration Reform. In short, the SAI found that the optimization of public administration has failed. Of all the key objectives concerning the limitation of staff numbers planned through two separate strategic documents (for the periods 2016–2020 and 2022–2026), only one was achieved—purely by accident. This refers to an apparent decrease in the share of public administration employees in total employment in Montenegro—a factor which, as the SAI correctly states, is “a consequence of fluctuations in employment in both the public and real sectors, not the result of any policies or measures to limit public employment.”
A particularly striking detail in the SAI report is that members of one coordination team for implementing strategic measures received compensation even though they never met once. Could there be a better inversion of public administration reform? A better poster image for a bureaucracy that pretends to reform itself—supposedly “optimizing” everything from workflows to hiring—while multiplying pseudo-coordination bodies that get paid for what should be their regular duties, and then don’t even do that?
Beyond multiplying such “coordination structures” that achieve nothing, our Government also loves to multiply plans. Just a few days after the SAI report—which went largely unnoticed—the Government adopted the Dynamic Plan of Measures for Strengthening Administrative Capacities in Public Administration for 2025–2026, in the context of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees.
A long title. Sounds ambitious. It implies that a plan could also be “static.” But this one isn’t—or maybe it is—since the document is entirely retrospective, consisting solely of an overview of past results, employment trends, implementation of previous EU accession obligations, and comparative practices that produced those sobering figures mentioned at the start.
At first glance, the conclusions the Government published last week to accompany this plan seem to go a step further. Government services, administrative bodies, and all ministries were instructed to submit, within seven days, data on the number of employees, age structure, and staffing needs for both EU chapter negotiations and other tasks. They were also reminded to use a new possibility introduced by the amendments to the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees (the permanent reassignment of employees between state bodies) before announcing any new job vacancies.
Sounds slightly better. But only to those unfamiliar with the legal framework. Because all these “dynamic plans” are, in fact, regular statutory obligations—staff planning, job filling through reassignments or public announcements—all prescribed by law. It’s true, however, that these obligations are not being followed, as we at Institute Alternative have written several times, noting that the last comprehensive staffing plan at the Government level was adopted five years ago.
Still, is our bar really so low that we need a plan just to obey the law?
Meanwhile, the Government—without public consultation and bypassing the working group on amendments to the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees—adopted a Regulation on testing of competencies of prospective civil servants. This bylaw introduced major changes in recruitment procedures, establishing new competencies to be assessed by commissions supposedly free from political influence. While the need to raise standards in this important area is not disputed, it is unfortunate that the Government, in its hyperproduction of teams that never meet and plans that add nothing new, failed to include the domestic public in drafting this key act. Because despite the framework of competencies and provisions preventing politically exposed persons from evaluating candidates—as has often been the case—the Regulation still does not provide essential guarantees of transparency or full reporting on conducted tests. And without a reliable assessment of candidates’ abilities, there can be no strengthening of administrative capacity.
Finally, the Government clearly lacks the resolve to monitor employment in local governments, which continue to accumulate debt from unpaid taxes and contributions on employees’ wages. Instead of making cuts, they appear rather extravagant in assessing their staffing needs: research by Institute Alternative showed that some municipalities plan to nearly double their workforce, while all municipalities from which we obtained staffing plans intend to hire over 1,300 new employees in total.
That is why no new plan can substitute for a lack of results—nor can it convince anyone, even for a moment, that a genuine reform is taking place.