Knowledge economy in Lithuania - the missing ingredients: (1) strategic planning and oversight

Over the last few weeks the Lithuanian government has been boosting the go-ahead on the new nuclear power plant that it received from the legislators. Although IRII is not in position to comment on the prospects of the nuclear power for Lithuania, this matter gave ample evidence of complete lack of strategic planning in Lithuania – one of the principal obstacles for establishing innovative knowledge economy.

In adopting the new nuclear power plant agenda, the government was quick to forget how the Lithuanian energy sector was „reformed“ over the last decade - by splitting up the single state energy monopoly into a bunch of relatively weak entities, then privatising some of them. What was emphasized now is the fact that Lithuanian energy sector must be consolidated (re-privatised with tax payer money) to strengthen it in order to deal with such major project as the new nuclear power plant. Why it was necessary to split/privatize the sector in the first place? Of course the hundreds of millions of transaction costs, which fell and will fall again onto the ordinary tax-payer, are not on the table this time.

Unfortunately the same situation is present in most if not all governmental efforts aimed at the knowledge economy. The efforts are swamped in the multitude of different strategies, programs and initiatives, which all declare the ultimate goal of advancing Lithuania to the knowledge economy, however fail to provide any coordinated and serious action. To make things worse – the matters are sought for by five ministries, several departments, and hordes of commissions and other institutions, which have overlapping competences and budgets, lack incentives to coordinate their actions, and just prefer to soak-up the public funds available at a time. Why bother with action, if such conjuncture simply encourages even further bureaucracy and process? Moreover no one is overseeing the whole picture. Although ideally the coordination shall be done at the government level, the government is just too busy with nuclear power and other „more important“ businesses of today, not even speaking about the legislative branch. All this results in uncoordinated legislation, sporadic implementation efforts, and accelerated waste of the EU Structural Fund money on „knowledge economy infrastructure“.

The question is not even what action is necessary, or what strategy is appropriate? Action is clear enough and for long enough – take and implement at least some of the actions sought for the 1995 EU Green Paper on Innovation, some might even find it shocking how fresh and apropos it might be. The question is - why it was not done in the last 12 years? IRII would also add – where is the political will and coordinated governmental effort?