LOBBYING AND SOCIAL PARTICIPATION - KEY FEATURES FOR AN EFFECTIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN ROMANIA

Lobbying is one of the main structural elements of democratic governance and sustainable development and is essential to achieving competitive and efficient administrative and decisional processes in local governance. Successfully implementing lobbying regulations and techniques is of extreme importance for any public system, where social participation in the decision-making process can strongly contribute to social, political and economic / financial efficiency. Over the last 15 years, several legislative initiatives have tried to design a coherent framework for lobby, but they are still unapplied either due to insufficient public understanding of the concept, or due to more or less justified uncertainties and fears. The necessity of regulating lobbying in Romania is placed in a context where an important number of anticorruption international and domestic recommendations and state reliability statistics, added to a certain lack of effectiveness in time and public money management, show that the public administration system needs to be reformed. And lobbying is, as the following article shows, a must for any public reform of public administration in Romania. The case of multilingual entrance signs / labels in Cluj-Napoca is an unquestionable and unbeatable example that the simple existence of legal frameworks of lobbying could turn into real time, energy and money savers.