Introduction

In multilevel systems, subnational governments control many important areas of policy making. Not surprisingly, as a consequence they require a lot of personnel, including so-called policy bureaucrats (PBs). It is argued that, compared to the national level, subnational PBs are more commonly engaged in ‘street-level’ advice, oriented towards day-to-day firefighting and implementation of public programmes and policies. This chapter focuses on PBs at regional authorities in the Czech Republic. It starts with a brief and general introduction to the distribution of competencies between regions and other levels of government. Then we examine the profile of Czech regional public bureaucrats including demographics, education, training and work experience. The next part deals with questions of how policy work is actually done in this specific context (that is, how policy knowledge is generated and utilised) and, in particular, what different tasks are done and which methods and sources of information are used by regional policy workers. Based upon a large-scale questionnaire survey carried out in all Czech regions except the capital city of Prague at the end of 2012 (N = 783), the paper thus provides a descriptive analysis of the relationship among the tasks, activities and methods regional policy bureaucrats use.

Subnational governments in the Czech Republic

Since 2000, the regional self-government of the Czech Republic has been formed by 13 regions (kraje). A so-called joint model of public administration has been established, meaning that regions (and municipalities) also exercise some tasks of the state administration in addition to their own competencies and independent powers. These tasks can be delegated to regional authorities in cases provided for by an Act of Parliament. Regions are public law corporations and they reestablished a regional level of governance in the Czech public administration as part of a complex reform undertaken after the fall of the previous regime in 1989 (see Baun and Marek, 2006). During this reform, more than 70 districts (okresy) were replaced with 204 municipalities which took over most of their administrative tasks (see Chapter Nine). The rest of the functions went to the regions with the aim to pursue universal development of their territories and to protect public interests.