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The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the public administration (PA) development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from an ex post perspective covering the past three decades.

The paper reviews prior literature on CEE and PA paradigms. The authors propose to distinguish between four main phases of public sector development in new democracies: post-communist transition, EU accession, post-accession fine-tuning, and e-governance.

There were many common features in the polities and PAs of the CEE countries at the beginning of the 1990s because of their common communist legacy, and also during the EU accession period, stemming from the “administrative capacity” requirement by the EU. However, domestic decisions of individual CEE governments following accession have moved them apart from each other. While some CEE countries face reversals of democratic public governance reforms, others are leading e-government initiatives – the current phase of public sector development.

The choice of countries is limited to the new member states of the European Union.

The paper shows that it is increasingly difficult to generalize findings, let alone to offer recommendations, that apply to all CEE countries. This is likely to lead to an end of a specific CEE administrative tradition as previously conceptualized in academic literature.

The article analyzes the ‘Europeanization’ of public administration in Estonia with a specific focus on the development of coordination structures. The decentralized approach to European Union-related matters increases the need for well-functioning coordination practices. The authors conclude that the coordination mechanism established for the accession as well as its impact on the broader coordination culture have been successful and can serve as the role model for the rest of public administration. The broader administrative problems yet to be solved include democratic deficit, insufficient engagement of civil society organizations, potential implementation gap between formal regulations and their practice, as well as poor policy analysis which may become particularly problematic after joining the EU.

The purpose of the paper is to outline and analyse the limitations and opportunities of decentralised human resource management (HRM) in the public sector.

The paper is based on a case study of the Estonian Central Government.

It is demonstrated that the absence of a central human resource strategy, combined with fragmentation, insufficient coordination and a lack of common values throughout the public service as well as with other limitations related to the country's post‐communist legacy has hindered a systematic approach to public service HRM. However, the paper also reveals that a decentralised setup of HRM has enabled Estonia to flexibly conduct major reforms on the organisational level during the transition of the 1990s and in the following Europeanisation period.

Although the case study method limits the extent to which findings of the study may be generalised to other countries and settings, there are still several lessons to be learned from the Estonian case of no central HR strategy.

The practical recommendations are related to the applicability of the strategic HRM model, path dependency of the development of HRM and the strategic fit between a country's HRM model and the wider context in which it is applied.

The paper provides a new look to the macro‐level HR policies and to the institutional setup of central HR coordination in the context of fast reforms.