The economic crisis, austerity measures and the new challenges of the 21st century have determined governments to adopt new tools of public actions in order to strengthen the policy capacity. A new paradigm was born, and its main feature is collaboration among government’s level (ministries) and between government and private sector. It brings new tools of public policy among others, and contracting out used by policymakers at various stages of public policy cycle and for different sets of reasons. This paper explores theoretically how this new approach strengthens the public policy capacity and provides evidence occurring in Romanian government practice. While, Romania has a legalistic, a normative approach of policy processes and street-level bureaucracies are guided by managerial targets and law, it starts to contract out some tasks that traditionally belong to government. The main scientific objective of this paper is to contribute an overall understanding of contracting out in public policy-making in Romania, particular in pensions system, focused on the rationality of introducing that.From a methodological standpoint, the paper relies on comprehensive and systematic search of the literature and document analysis (among others Annual Reports, authorities’ data, resume, obtained by using free accession to information) and statistics data processing (quantitative and qualitative interpretation of data from National Institute of Statistics).
