Opinion: State to civic organisations – don't interfere with our governance!

Editor Avo-Rein Tereping writes that civic organisations and non-governmental organisations often offer free solutions to state problems, but their proposals go unimplemented. The main obstacle is a lack of coordination capacity across ministries.

Estonia has numerous civic organisations and non-governmental organisations that bring concrete solutions to the table for problems facing the state – and they do so for free, relying on competent experts from outside politics. Yet many of these proposals go unimplemented.

This becomes particularly acute when a proposed solution requires cooperation and coordinated action between different ministries. That is precisely where the system's weakest point appears to lie: as soon as responsibility is scattered across multiple ministries, the will and capacity to undertake joint action vanishes.

Editor Avo-Rein Tereping identifies this phenomenon as a common denominator of state administrative incapacity. This does not mean that public sector employees are lazy or ill-intentioned – rather, it reflects a structural problem where the system itself does not encourage cooperation or the implementation of ideas coming from external parties.

When the state cannot make use of freely offered expertise and good ideas, it is an expensive mistake for society. Civic organisations do not replace the state, but they can fill gaps that bureaucracy itself fails to notice. The question is whether the state apparatus is ready to acknowledge this and change.