UofG Centre for Public Policy

23 October 2025: Continuing our European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) blog series, Dr Eka Akobia examines Georgia as an example of 'de-professionalisation' and 'repoliticisation' of public service, cautioning that reforms can crumble without strong institutions and political commitment.

Blog by Eka Akobia, Dean and Professor at Caucasus School of Governance, Caucasus University 

Georgia today illustrates why the professional communities’ mission to curate knowledge, strengthen ethics, and build capacity as well as safeguard the professional and ethical standards of public matters. Over the past year, emergency amendments to the Law on Civil Service and related statutes have dismantled core merit protections. Senior professional posts have been converted into administrative contracts, reorganizations have been simplified, and more than 1000 civil servants have been dismissed - unmistakably due to their value-based, pro-European position expressed at a critical juncture for Georgia - the announcement by the ruling party to halt Georgia’s EU accession process until 2028. In a retaliatory move, the Civil Service Bureau itself has been abolished. What we are seeing is not simply a story of personnel changes - it is a textbook case of de-professionalization, repoliticization, where loyalty is privileged over competence, and short-term control is chosen over long-term institutional capacity - threatening and undermining public value.

Yet there is resilience. Despite repression, political detentions, and persecutions - despite around 100 unduly arrested citizens behind bars - people continue to gather. For 300 consecutive days and continuing, Georgians have filled Rustaveli Avenue in the heart of Tbilisi. Their presence is more than protest. It is an act of democratic vigilance, a collective statement that integration with Europe is not only a matter of foreign policy, but also a deep societal aspiration, defended in the streets when threatened in the institutions.

Let us not forget that up until recently, Georgia was a trailblazing case of reforms and performance in the EU’s Eastern Partnership format and ahead of many European countries in terms number of governance indicators. However, Georgia showcases how reforms can crumble without strong institutions and political commitment. It offers a cautionary tale not just for Georgia but for any aspirant of public administration modernization - especially under populist or authoritarian pressures.

Georgia adopted EU-aligned public administration reforms (2014–2016 Civil Service Law, PAR roadmap; with donors such as the EU, UNDP, GIZ, USAID playing significant roles), then - once the ruling party had banked the symbolic gains - re-politicized the service (including abolishing the Civil Service Bureau in Feb–Apr 2025) and purged hundreds of officials. This is the classic arc of front-loaded compliance followed by selective reversal when external leverage wanes or when regime-survival logics bite.

Georgia’s trajectory demonstrates that EU conditionality can catalyse formal civil-service reform without guaranteeing its survival. Some of the EU integration theories claim that compliance hinges on credible rewards and domestic costs; where accession is distant, rulers may instrumentalize reform, harvest the legitimacy, and later re-politicize the bureaucracy for regime survival - precisely what we observe in Georgia.

Recent empirics about partial compliance and “stabilitocracy” show that this is not an outlier but a regional pattern: formal convergence, practical divergence. Very often, it seems, “stabilitocracy” was a chosen strategy from the EU as well, albeit due to lack of a more nuanced enlargement methodology, which helped regimes harvest the undeserved legitimacy stemming from their façade EU integration policies for too long.

The most urgent task for the European research frontiers right now is measuring how to deepen EU socialization and approximation during the EU integration process rather do it at the very end, when membership takes place. Hence, considering a phased approach and interchangeable carrots and sticks is a theoretical and policy agenda worth pursuing. Re-politicization of civil service in an EU candidate country is but one symptom of an EU Enlargement policy that is in need of refinement. Identifying lock-in designs that keep merit systems intact when the politics turn is but one area where EU integration theory and policy could improve if they are to serve both societal and geopolitical goals.

Author

Eka Akobia is Dean and Professor at Caucasus School of Governance, Caucasus University. She is immediate past President of the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee).

More information

The 2025 European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) Annual Conference was hosted by the University of Glasgow and Centre for Public Policy 26 - 29 August, welcoming more than 750 delegates from across the world to our University and city. Read more about Glasgow’s EGPA conference from Centre for Public Policy Senior Lecturer Dr Ian C. Elliott.  

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First published: 23 October 2025