Kosovo Divided by Marius-Ionut Calu

Author:Marius-Ionut Calu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Managing Diversity through Decentralization

Minority rights at the local level of governance in Kosovo

Within the myriad of post-conflict statebuilding mechanisms and strategies, decentralization has become particularly popular for dealing with the management of diversity at the local level of governance.1 This novel intersection of concerns for good governance with those aiming to foster minority protection and accommodation has also been visible within the statebuilding missions emerging after the 1990s ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. Broadly speaking, local governance was always going to be a highly delicate issue for the post-conflict social, political, institutional, economic, demographic and territorial changes brought by the breakup of Yugoslavia. The challenges for local governance have been somehow similar to other post-conflict policies and tools in the sense that statebuilding from scratch often faces the dilemma of harmonizing state capacity with democratization, which may also include the diffusion of power through decentralization.2

Ten years after its unilateral declaration of independence and almost twenty years since the 1999 war, Kosovo is still facing significant challenges in developing self-rule and sustainable capacity at both central and local levels of governance. This chapter reflects on the task to merge decentralization as a purely administrative tool (building devolved, accountable, legitimate, efficient local governance) and decentralization as a tool for post-(ethnic)conflict reconciliation and power-sharing governance. I will thus discuss the measures taken to integrate, accommodate and protect minorities at the local level in Kosovo while mainly addressing the situation of the Serb community as the key target of the process of decentralization. The first part of the chapter takes into consideration general arguments that show both positive and negative aspects of using decentralization as a tool for managing diversity. This may involve, for instance, the creation of decentralized governance on ethnic lines by empowering minorities that are in majority in a certain area. One positive outcome can be determining minority communities to accept and legitimize the authority of state institutions in exchange of a high degree of local autonomy. However, a key risk of this strategy is to cause territorial and institutional isolation of minority municipalities3 on the long term. Furthermore, the practical and non-ethnic benefits of decentralization (good governance, local democracy, etc.) may not be compatible with the ethnic criteria of establishing or empowering minority municipalities because the new administrative units may lack the necessary capacities for sustainable local self-governance.

This chapter then looks at the legislation starting with the comprehensive proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement (CSP), which represents the foundation of the decentralization strategy in Kosovo. This document had as priority addressing the needs of Kosovo Serbs by empowering them at the local level so as to gradually diminish the influence of parallel structures sponsored by Serbia and encourage them to accept the authority of Kosovo. The evident influence of the Ahtisaari Plan on drawing the post-independence legislation is analysed in the section on the post-2008 legal framework that has been regulating local government and decentralization in Kosovo. This will confirm the de jure high degree of transfer of powers from

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