Administrative policies in Estonia : the implication on the structural arrangement

ADMINISTRATIVE POLICIES IN ESTONIA. THE IMPLICATION ON STRUCTURAL ARRANGEMENT Estonia has undergone vast range of changes and reforms in the last ten year period. The thesis seeks to give an account on the processes that depict the governance problematique from the administrative policy perspective. The thesis takes a closer look on the relevant political events, the development of legislation, and the factual arrangement of top administrative system. The research emphasizes the structural arrangement of governmental and top administrative affairs. The guiding inquiry in the thesis problematizes whether it is, in the case of Estonia, analytically justified to speak about instrumental administrative policies, especially in the framework of political analysis. If "yes", then what determines the choice of the administrative policy instruments? As appears, in the Estonian case, the general contexts and the externally defined criteria for legitimate action (and not so much the careful analysis of the concrete problem situations) have had a considerable impact on the definition and choice of alternative instruments. The effect is there, but the issues are, first of all, determined by the antecedent variables. The government and administrative reforms seem to have been the objectives on their own right. According to the findings, the administrative policies in Estonia have had a rather strong factual effect. However the external definition of substance and the modifications dictated to the reform policies by contextual factors make it problematic to explicitly apply the concept instrumental design. If we are to distinguish between the "organizational-technical-instrumental" and "institutional-cultural-moralizing" in the political analysis of the administrative affairs in Estonia, then the latter seems to have been the main explanatory factor in the choice of administrative policy alternatives and the character of implementation processes. The thesis consists of two main separate at first glance, but conceptually tightly knit together parts . The first part (chapter 1-2) concentrates on the establishment of theoretical framework, and the second part (chapter 3) combines, step-by-step, the theoretical considerations into a systematic account on the central topics of the public administrative development in Estonia. The final chapter (chapter 4) draws out the main conclusions that are of analytical relevance. It builds on the conclusions from the empirical part, and should be approached together with those. One of the important messages in the thesis is that especially from the institutional development and policy agenda point of view the transition to democracy cannot be interpreted in terms of disruption and starting from nil. The reforms that began already with the launch of Perestroika and Glasnost in the eighties, and the conflict patterns and experience that were imbedded into the policy agenda (and state structures) in the beginning of nineties, far before the re-establishment of the Estonian independent statehood, all have had a fairly strong effect on the current structural arrangement of administrative affairs, but also on the rhetoric related to the institutional reform in general and the administrative reform in particular