The gap between the state on paper and real life

After more than fifty days of protests, Prime Minister Edi Rama acknowledged in his Friday speech that behind the political slogans and often absurd claims from the protest square lies a legitimate public anger. Much of it is directed at the administration and at people’s daily dealings with the state.

“Besa,” the document presented as a new strategy for tackling these problems, proposes a series of measures designed to make decision-making more transparent and, crucially, easier for citizens to understand. All are necessary. Some are long overdue.

But Albania is not short of strategies or reforms. Over the past three decades, it has probably had too many, and some have done more harm than good. The real problem is the gap between the state on paper and the state people actually meet: in hospitals, public offices and routine services, where citizens often have to plead with someone in authority for something the law already guarantees them.

Transparency and oversight matter, but they are not the administration’s deepest problems. More damaging are its arrogance and the petty exercise of power that has taken root in many institutions. No document can fix that overnight. It is tied to the quality of education, recruitment practices and the role political loyalty plays in public appointments.

The greatest difficulty is that those expected to modernise the administration do not experience it as ordinary citizens do. They may know it through figures and reports, but they are rarely its victims. Even when they formally follow the same procedures, it is doubtful that they go through the same experience as everyone else.

Both realities can exist at once: that of the ordinary citizen and that of the senior official or politician. The government may be perfectly sincere when it reports higher funding or announces a new procedure. A citizen may be equally sincere when asking why obtaining a service or document feels more complicated than the ordeal of Josef K. The problem is that only the first reality usually reaches the room where decisions are made: budgets, targets and statistics. The second—the waiting, the confusion and the endless doors behind which people are sent without understanding what is required of them—stays outside. It does not fit the language in which those in power measure success.

If “Besa” truly aims to change the relationship between government and citizens, it should begin by judging every public service not only through statistics, but through the full experience of someone trying to use it without first producing a business card with an important title.

The measures in “Besa” may help. But Albania’s experience with administrative reform gives people every reason to doubt whether they will change how institutions behave or simply improve the language used to defend that behaviour. As long as those who govern do not experience these processes as everyone else does, little will change.

Unfortunately, the public statements of many MPs, current officials and former members of government suggest that a large number of them have no idea how the system actually works. They know only how it is supposed to work.