Jakša Puljiz

Motivation: Small post‐recipient donor states face increasing pressure to professionalize international development cooperation while simultaneously responding to crisis‐driven humanitarian and geopolitical demands. Croatia's rapid transition from EU accession in 2013 to donor status offers a revealing case for examining how such states institutionalize development cooperation under EU and OECD‐DAC norms in a context of sustained neighbourhood shocks. Purpose: This article examines how Croatia has institutionalized its international development cooperation since becoming a donor and assesses whether its emerging donor profile aligns with EU/OECD‐DAC expectations while effectively operationalizing a declared transition and post‐conflict niche. Approach and methods: The study employs a mixed‐methods case study design combining thematic analysis of Croatian international development cooperation legislation and strategies, descriptive analysis of official development assistance trends from 2013 to 2024, and systematic coding of Croatia's bilateral project portfolio for 2020–2024. Findings: The analysis shows that Croatia's ODA expanded rapidly after 2021, reaching 0.21% of GNI in 2023 and 0.22% in 2024, while remaining heavily concentrated in the Western Balkans and Ukraine. Five‐year portfolio analysis (2020–2024) shows a dual‐track pattern: a structurally Bosnia‐and‐Herzegovina‐centred Western Balkans portfolio and a crisis‐driven Ukraine portfolio. In the Western Balkans, education/culture and healthcare dominate financial allocations, while peace, security, and governance grew from EUR 165,000 in 2020 to EUR 1.9 million in 2024, indicating an emerging but still modest niche‐relevant category. More broadly, peace, security, and post‐conflict assistance had become financially substantial by 2024 when Ukraine‐related support is included. Although Croatia consistently frames transition experience—such as post‐conflict recovery, demining, and EU‐accession know‐how—as its comparative advantage, nationally recorded technical‐assistance accounts for less than 1% of total ODA. This outcome is driven by fragmented coordination, issues with recording of aid, and overreliance on EU instruments such as Twinning and TAIEX, rather than by an absence of expertise provision. Policy implications: The findings suggest that Croatia's next convergence step as a small donor depends less on redefining its strategic priorities than on strengthening governance and measurement capacities. Modest system‐wide reforms, such as unified national international development cooperation registries, mandatory strategic tagging, light results frameworks, and system‐wide reporting training, offer a more realistic and effective pathway to enhancing DAC credibility and niche visibility under crisis conditions than premature agency‐style institutional redesign.

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractThis paper analyzes the determinants of municipal capital transfer allocation in North Macedonia using data for all 80 municipalities over 2018–2022. Capital transfers are a key investment instrument in fiscally decentralized systems, yet their fragmented and project-based delivery may weaken equalization. To test whether transfers follow developmental or fiscal-capacity criteria, the study combines baseline OLS estimates with a two-part (hurdle) model that separates access from transfer intensity, quantile regressions to capture distributional heterogeneity, and inequality measures. The results show no statistically significant association between municipal development level or fiscal capacity and the probability of receiving any capital transfer, indicating that entry into the system is not needs-based. Conditional on receipt, the development coefficient is negative but not robustly significant, indicating no systematic targeting of less-developed units among recipients. Inequality diagnostics reinforce this conclusion: the Gini coefficient for per-capita capital transfers (0.75) vastly exceeds that for municipal revenues (0.18), and Lorenz curves reveal a sharply more unequal transfer distribution. Overall, the evidence implies that unobserved institutional or political factors dominate the access margin and that capital transfers currently introduce an additional layer of territorial divergence rather than mitigating existing disparities.AcknowledgmentsThe author gratefully acknowledges the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for providing access to data used in this research. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of UNDP.

Accession to the EU enabled Croatia to invest significant financial resources from the Cohesion policy to support its socio-economic development and catch up with more developed member countries. The availability of EU grants accelerated the recovery of public investments after their sharp decline following the outbreak of the 2009 economic crisis. In addition to the enormous financial impact, the Cohesion policy played a crucial role in changing the main features of public investments in Croatia. This chapter explores in more detail how the Cohesion policy has changed and is still changing the public investment policy in Croatia. Significant changes occurred in strategic planning, cross-sectoral and vertical cooperation, monitoring and evaluation. Numerous actors at the national and subnational levels had significant direct and indirect benefits from the Cohesion policy. However, putting new policy tools and approaches into practice and ensuring efficient spending of the available financial resources is anything but a simple exercise. On the contrary, implementing an ambitious and effective investment policy was challenging for the Croatian administration.

The year 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of Croatia’s membership of the European Union, the last acceding country to the EU, and thus represents a fitting opportunity to explore the political, economic and social dimensions of this tremendous transformation. This book examines how Croatia has changed over the last ten years and looks at the driving forces as well as the obstacles on its post-accession path of Europeanisation. The book argues that the Croatian case has special importance given that the last decade of European integration has arguably been the most challenging one yet. It started with the Eurozone-wide sovereign debt crisis and ended with the economic hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression on Ukraine. Such demanding circumstances where agenda was often defined in an ad hoc way posed a huge test for Croatia’s governmental capacity. The book provides answers to the question of how successful Croatian policymakers were in dealing with the crises-related challanges and other needed adaptations. The book explores how EU membership has affected the design and implementation of selected national public policies, the functioning of governing institutions and patterns of cooperation between main social actors. Expert contributors analyse the impact of the EU membership in two principal areas: political and economic, with individual chapters addressing relevant topics. The book is intended for researchers, academics and students interested in these issues, as well as policymakers, entrepreneurs and lobbyists concerned with European integration.

The introductory chapter explains the motivation behind this book, which, through scholarly analysis, commemorates the tenth anniversary of Croatian EU membership. The historical overview of Croatia’s difficult path to the EU opens this introduction as a vital cornerstone upon which the country’s post-accession reality could be measured and analysed. This chapter further presents the broader context of Croatia’s decade-long EU membership, marked by many economic and political crises. Such context has been the most challenging yet for the EU, its member states and the European integration process. The separate part of this introduction is committed to a review of the theoretical concept of Europeanisation. The review shows that Europeanisation is a highly complex phenomenon which escapes unambiguous definitions. This introduction also overviews all other chapters, underlining their main highlights.

The paper examines a paradigmatic example of post-conflict economic development of Vukovar, Croatia. It represents a pertinent case study for localities encountering analogous challenges, most notably urban areas in Ukraine in the near future. The war that broke out in 1991 brought significant human casualties, population displacement, and extensive destruction of residential, social, and economic infrastructure. The completion of the peaceful reintegration of Vukovar into Croatia’s legal system in 1998 marked the beginning of the socio-economic revitalization process. The research scrutinizes the primary impediments and prospects for Vukovar’s economic growth, probing why substantial investments in reconstructing housing, transport, communal infrastructure, and fiscal incentives for businesses have not paralleled its economic performance. It concentrates on the local business climate and influential factors as potential explanations for this discrepancy. The topic was designed as a case study and was covered by document analysis, survey method, and semi-structured interviews. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the study collates perspectives from entrepreneurs and business support institutions. The results confirmed that reconstruction of housing and social infrastructure is necessary, but more conditions are needed for successful post-conflict economic development, and that the business climate in lagging local units highly depends on state- and locally designed business-support measures.

U radu se analizira pristup integriranog urbanog upravljanja te njegovi potencijali i izazovi. Integrirano urbano upravljanje, temeljeno na standardima dobrog upravljanja i sinergiji javnih politika kroz policy integraciju, odnosi se na horizontalnu integraciju sektorskih politika i različitih uključenih aktera, na vertikalnu integraciju različitih razina upravljanja kao i na integraciju izvan administrativnih granica. Integrirani pristup u literaturi se često spominje kao poželjan oblik upravljanja, a brojni europski primjeri dobre prakse upućuju na zaključak kako primjena integriranog pristupa razvoju i provedba integriranog upravljanja pridonose djelotvornijem i svrhovitijem razvoju područja u kojem se primjenjuju, čime se potiču ključne i održive razvojne promjene u korist lokalnih zajednica. Svrha je ovog rada pregledom relevantne znanstvene literature i komparativnim prikazom primjera dobre prakse doprinijeti znanstvenoj i stručnoj raspravi o provedbi integriranog pristupa u gradovima. Pritom se nastoji produbiti razumijevanje i unaprijediti primjena integriranog pristupa u hrvatskim gradovima.