A decade after the 2015 Public Service Law took effect, structural gaps in merit-based recruitment and pay transparency continue to undermine the reform's original promise.
Georgia's Public Service Law, adopted in 2015 and heralded at the time as a cornerstone of the country's EU integration agenda, was supposed to professionalise the civil service, insulate it from political interference, and build a merit-based bureaucracy capable of governing a modern state. Nearly a decade on, the evidence suggests the law has delivered only partial results — and in several critical areas, its implementation has stalled in ways that carry real costs for public sector workers, service delivery, and Georgia's broader reform credibility.
The legislation established the Civil Service Bureau as the central coordinating body, introduced competitive recruitment requirements, and created a unified classification system for public positions. These were meaningful steps. Yet the framework contained structural weaknesses from the outset: broad exemptions for political appointees, vague criteria for probationary dismissals, and a pay-setting architecture that left remuneration levels largely at the discretion of individual agencies rather than tying them to transparent, system-wide scales. What looked like a comprehensive reform on paper became, in practice, a patchwork of compliance.
The numbers tell a sobering story. According to data from Georgia's Civil Service Bureau, as of 2023 approximately 43 percent of civil servant vacancies were filled through direct appointment rather than open competitive procedures — a figure that has remained stubbornly elevated since the law's enactment and that stands in sharp contrast to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the 2015 framework. The ILO has consistently flagged non-transparent recruitment as one of the primary drivers of public sector inefficiency in lower-middle-income economies, and Georgia is not an exception. When nearly half of public sector hiring bypasses open competition, the merit principle becomes aspirational rather than operational.
Pay equity presents an equally complex picture. The law mandated the development of a unified remuneration system, but successive governments have deferred full implementation. The result is a fragmented landscape in which salaries for comparable roles can vary by a factor of two or three depending on whether a civil servant works for a line ministry, an independent regulatory body, or a legal entity of public law. This dispersion does not reflect differences in skill or responsibility; it reflects institutional history, political attention, and budget allocation cycles. For the civil servants at the lower end of the distribution — administrative staff in regional offices, for instance — real wages have failed to keep pace with inflation, quietly eroding the attractiveness of public employment and driving turnover in precisely the positions that deliver front-line services.
The governance implications extend beyond individual workers. A civil service in which recruitment is opaque and pay is arbitrary is also a civil service that is structurally vulnerable to clientelism. Political transitions become high-stakes reshuffling exercises rather than routine changes of policy direction, because positions that should be insulated from electoral cycles are in practice contestable. Georgia's EU accession process makes this directly relevant: the European Commission's annual progress reports have repeatedly cited civil service professionalisation as an area requiring sustained effort, and the 2023 Opinion on Georgia's application was notably cautious on public administration reform.
GILS takes the view that the 2015 law requires not wholesale replacement but targeted, enforceable amendment in three areas. First, the exemption categories for political appointees should be narrowed and clearly defined in statute, with independent oversight of any appointment made outside the competitive procedure. Second, the unified remuneration framework must move from a paper commitment to a binding, publicly accessible pay scale, indexed to a credible benchmark and reviewed annually by the Civil Service Bureau in consultation with trade unions and employer representatives. Third, the Bureau's monitoring and enforcement capacity needs to be strengthened: publishing aggregate recruitment data once a year is insufficient; real-time disclosure of vacancy outcomes, selection panel composition, and appointment rationale should become the norm rather than the exception.
None of this is technically complex. The tools exist — the ILO's guidelines on public employment services, the OECD's framework for strategic human resource management in government, and the accumulated experience of EU member states that have navigated similar transitions all provide actionable models. What has been lacking in Georgia is not knowledge but political will to apply consistent pressure on agencies that benefit from the current ambiguity.
The next twelve months are consequential. Parliament is expected to revisit the public administration legislative package as part of ongoing EU harmonisation commitments, and the Civil Service Bureau is finalising a new strategic plan. These are genuine windows for reform. Whether they produce durable change or another round of well-drafted intentions will depend on whether civil society, international partners, and the workers most directly affected by the law's shortcomings maintain sustained, evidence-based pressure on the process.
Read the full GILS analysis at labour.edu.ge/law-public-service/