SMALLOER STATE - A REFORM FAILED? ASSESSMENT REPORT OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL AUTHORITIES IN HUNGARY

• Authors: Javor B. , Nemeth K.
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

The authors studied the performance of the Hungarian environmental authorities during its transformation period between 2003 and 2006. The effects of the changes and the parallel staff cuts were estimated through official data demands and interviews. The correspondence to the legal obligations in the publicity of information of public interest was also evaluated. According to our results, the Hungarian environmental institutions were underfinanced even before the reforms and needed considerable reinforcement. The structural transformation was unavoidable because of the EU's expectations and its conception could be successful. However, being unfinished, it resulted in an unclear structure of the authorities what made co-operation problematic for the official bodies. There is a lack of field knowledge and field presence of the authorities; its conditions were not ensured in the new system. Instead of being reinforced, staff cuts and a considerable reduction of financial resources were carried out at the authorities. As a result the level of their work decreased in the period studied, authorization became more and more permissive, controls and punitive sanctions got scarcer. Some areas (e.g. nature conservation) can represent their interest decreasingly in the new model. During the reforms there was no widespread monitoring and the ex post evaluation of the reforms by the government is totally missing. Also producing data for such an evaluation by the authorities could be problematic, because their reports are not made in a consistent structure and are incomparable. The same is the situation in the case of the publicity of the information of public interest, where correspondence to the legal obligations (e.g. Act on electronic publicity) is weak. Altogether, the authors propose the reinforcement of the financial and human resources, to clearly transfer all the authority functions to the new environmental authorities and to create a situation in the publicity of the information of public interest that meets the legal requirements.

Keywords

EN

AUDIT; AUTHORITY; ENVIRONMENT; NATURE CONSERVATION

Discipline

• POLITICAL_SCIENCES: POLITICAL SCIENCES

• Publisher: Department of Economics and Law, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Tarsadalomkutatas (Social Science Research)
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 487-511
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Javor B.

author

Nemeth K.

• B. Javor, Faculty of Law, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (for postal address contact the journal editor)

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09HUAAAA071220