Background: The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a specific type of decision-making trade-off faced by the Czech public procurement officials, namely the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance. The trade-off means that public procurers are aware of administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious non-perfunctory implementation of green public procurement.Results: The overall result is that public procurers ultimately come to prioritize the contract criterion of the lowest price over ecological criteria. The existence of this trade-off has been generally confirmed by the results of a unique large-N survey of more than 1100 respondents from a group of local public officials and mayors in the Czech Republic.Conclusion: We have found that the decision-making of Czech public procurers is affected by the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance, which turn out to be mutually conflicting goals. On the one hand, many public procurers do possess a stewardship motivation that shapes their positive attitude to GPP. On the other hand, they are painfully aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious, i.e., non-perfunctory, implementation of GPP.

This short communication describes the current experience of implementing village funds in Indonesia, with an emphasis on the impact on poverty reduction. The authors' field observation is complemented by structured interviews and regression analysis. Our findings suggest that the potential of village funds is not fully realized. We point out that officials underestimated the significance of bottlenecks related to the capacity of local governments, to the implementation of coordination mechanisms, and to the installation of feedback mechanisms, each of which critically hinge on administrative and technical policy processes. At the same time, we felt that the officials overestimated the importance and effectiveness their own political agendas promoting community empowerment and corruption prevention.

The paper deals with the issue of overpricing of public procurement in low-performing EU countries. It examines a uniquely large sample of public procurement in 11 Central and Eastern European countries. Hierarchical regression is used to analyze the factors that influence public contract. Our results indicate that institutional factors have a greater impact on overpricing than individual decisions by the contracting authority. Our analysis for low-performing EU countries provides interesting results and also draws attention to behavior that is not typical of the better established and more advanced EU countries. Our results are particularly important for public policy in each country, as they show the direction of regulatory action in the field of public procurement. The results introduce a debate on the appropriateness of “one size fits all” regulations within the EU.

Historical institutionalism is increasingly acknowledged as a promising theoretical platform in the field of nonprofit sector studies. The main goal of the paper is to review major applications of historical institutionalism to the nonprofit sector, with a particular focus on how this theoretical platform illuminates the responses of Czech nonprofit organizations to the Covid-19 crisis. In addition, the paper contributes to the conceptual toolbox of historical institutionalism, a novel approach of the retrograde analysis of events. Drawing on the Luhmannian systems theory, the events are taken to reflect system-building processes occurring at the level of nonprofit organizational fields, and comprise the mutual succession of critical junctures and the periods of relative stability in the evolution of the nonprofit sector. Applied to the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, the proposed approach allows to infer the high probability of new critical junctures. Given the enormous challenges and the growing resource deficits faced by Czech nonprofit organizations, many of their existing path-dependencies will be likely broken, with new ones being called into life.

The article focuses on risk assessment of individual and systematic corruption at the municipal level in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. For this purpose, it uses the method of Corruption Risk FMEA, which is based on the classic Fault Mode and Effect Analysis used mainly in production. The model views corruption as an individual action, the application of which revealed significant differences in corruption risk which were detrimental in Bulgaria. The causes of these differences can be seen in the normative attitude of the public towards corruption, the insufficient involvement of the general public, and also the lack in range of controls. Improving the current situation can be achieved in two ways. The “low road” means increasing controls, for example, audits (in particular) and performance benchmarking, and applying them at the appropriate time. The “high road” means utilizing soft instruments and a change in the normative approach of the public towards corruption.