Example: BULGARIA

The Bulgarian government of 2009-2013, led by the GERB party, was strongly focused on anti-corruption. Bulgaria had just had some of its EU funding cut off due to lack of progress on tackling corruption. The focus was especially strong in the Defence Ministry, whose senior leadership had already developed an anti-corruption strategy in 2008, ready to implement in 2009 were they to be elected.  Theirs was a broad initiative, attacking corruption on almost all fronts, using the new NATO-TI integrity-building tools, encouraging external media and NGO engagement, being highly transparent.  TI-DSP actively supported the anti-corruption initiative, mentoring the leadership, assisting with training and facilitating leadership events.

The successes and failures of the initiative are described in some detail in a detailed interview with the Deputy Defence Minister[11]. Besides staff changes, the new leadership made a large number of changes:

• Immediately established an anti-corruption council in the MOD as the key leadership change body
• Introduced transparency into formulating decisions as well as into the decision making process as a basic weapon against the hidden practices related to abuse of position-in- office for personal gain.
• All the activities of the leadership of the Ministry of Defence were conducted under complete publicity. This considerably improved the relations of the political leadership of defence with the expectations of the public
• Developed the strategic documents of the defence policy and the modernisation of the armed forces under the conditions of clear accountability to the citizens regarding the ways of spending the defence budget
• Put into law that any contract over €50 million should be approved by parliament
• Developed an Ethical Code of Conduct for the military and civilian personnel
• Introduced specialised training in anti-corruption practices
• Implemented rules on preventing and determining conflicts of interest
• Changed the internal rules on publication entirely: because everything was confidential or secret and nothing was published on the MOD website
• Changed the rules for the so-called “special procurement” for secret tenders. For the first time ever information about special tenders could be found on the website.
• Created a strategy for the management of surplus property and published on the webpage the complete list of real estate.

Positive evidence of impact is found in the relatively good scoring of Bulgaria – in band C – in the TI Government Defence Index in 2013[12], though no comparative evidence is available.

TO WHAT EFFECT?

The GERB government resigned in 2013, and the successor administration reversed a number of the reforms. My own conclusion is that they tried to do too much with a Ministry and military that still had deep ‘particularistic’ roots, with insufficient time. They could have been faster in the first year – Ms. Tzvetkova comments that perhaps she tried too hard to convince the 100 Division Chiefs of the merits of reform, and was thus too slow to dismiss those resistant to change – but it seems to me that they were pretty quick nonetheless, having already pre-prepared their plans. Ms Tzvetkova’s own assessment is that she was halfway through their reform programme when the GERB government fell. There is a parallel to TI’s defence work in Colombia in 2006/7/8 (see below), where the Defence Minister commented that one electoral cycle was insufficient time for a full, range of anti-corruption reforms in the Ministry. She thought that real cultural change would take 4-6 years, meaning that two cycles were required, on the basis that the first and last years in each electoral cycle would be taken up with campaigning or getting (re)established.

Bulgaria’s military and their reforms never had the public approval that came with most of the other countries in this paper, such as Afghanistan or Poland. It also seems that they were not leading – or at least not getting any credit for leading – reform across the government as a whole.

Our perception of Bulgaria’s experience is that it offers the following policy lessons:

• Ministry-by-Ministry plans have to be prepared. These plans have to be pre-prepared, unless major changes, including staff dismissals, are planned to be implemented right from the beginning
• Countries should be cautious about all-encompassing Ministry reform plans, however strong the will and commitment of the leadership. More prioritisation (see for example Poland below) is a lower-risk route.
• Have two plans running in parallel: Plan A to show progress through one electoral cycle, Plan B to build progress through two cycles, if re-elected.
• Transparency of information and decisions did help, but much less than anti-corruption theology would imply. It helped internally to know that the information was public, but it was not really picked up by the media or NGOs. The media, despite being courted, was similarly not much of a key player in encouraging or stimulating the reforms. The real lesson was that it was hard, internal work that had to be done to change the key processes – eg defence acquisition policy decision-making, technical requirement specifications, promotion approval boards, conflict of interest actions – and the key people, in order to see effective reduction in corruption.
• From a TI point of view, it has been critical to visit the MOD every few months, to provide support, offer ideas, and help resolve problems. There is so little practical anti-corruption expertise around that such ‘mentoring’ plays a big role in supporting a Ministry
• Similarly, leading an anti-corruption initiative is a lonely endeavour. Creating a support community internationally is very helpful – In this case it has been TI-DSP people, people in other countries doing the same thing (eg Poland), experts brought together by TI-DSP for discussion of new tools (eg via TI-DSP’s MEKANIC process[13]), military gatherings where like minded nations can confer, such as have been set up by NATO.