INTRODUCTION

It was almost five years ago when Bulgaria finally took the path to better regulation that the European Union had been following for decades. With a delay of almost 10 years from the moment our country became a member of the Union, our rule-making process also ‘joined’ it, accepting the impact assessment and the structured public consultations as mechanisms obligatory integrated in it.

At that time, for us the researchers in the field, this was a real revolution in our rule-making. We defined the then adopted most radical amendments to the Law on the Normative Acts since its adoption in the 1970s until today, not just a step towards the final abandonment and abolition of the rules and procedures for decision-making for legal regulation inherited from socialism. For us, this was and still is a real regulatory reform with a completely new philosophy of the Law, with new principles in rule-making and a change of the priorities in legal regulation. These amendments marked the beginning of the great change in the way of thinking, of the real transformation in the actions of the decision-makers in the area of legal regulation, of the modernization of our national legislation.

The goal of our first research on the topic published in early 2017 was not to go back in the past, but to look forward to the future to the new, different and innovative. On the contrary, the present publication aims to build on the first by looking back in time. From the standpoint of the first five years (the first “petiletka”) since the beginning of the regulatory reform, it seeks to check if the regulatory innovation, called impact assessment, has worked, whether it has made the rule-making process smart, ‘fit for future’ (F4F), etc. This publication is only in English and is the second updated edition of the previous Bulgarian version. It makes an effort to present comprehensively and to conceptualize the main theoretical aspects of regulatory reform in Bulgaria, and its key tools, such as the regulatory impact assessment and the public consultation in a structured form, in particular.