”I have to get that paper” is a sentence that is often heard in Balkan countries. Waiting at the counters, paying taxes, and in the last case pulling strings, is a reality that young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have turned into a social game.
Calling a relative, making a call, or selling your vote are the ways to complete the task in the board game ”Papirologija”(Paperwork). The game was designed by young people, and the main mission is to ”get that paper”. For almost two years, about seventy of them from all over the country developed the idea of how to present the bureaucratic reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the municipality, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the employment office, or the university.
”Through this game, we learned about a completely different level of division in our country. This is not the kind of division that we hear about every day: Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, but it is one level of division where you have different laws, and different rules in two entities, then in those two entities you have different laws through the cantons, and then in those cantons each municipality is different,” Selma Hrncic stated, a student from Gradacac.
They met in forgotten cultural institutions all over the country, and they promote the game in one of them because they do not have their own premises. The heroes of games, such as ”Klasicni Baksuz” (Classic Jinx) and ”Ganjac Papira” (Paper Chaser) were created based on the experiences of the BiH youth.
”Paper chasing” should become a thing of the past with the digitalization of public administration. The European Union (EU) sees this reform as one of the key ones. 16 years after the beginning of the reform, its coordinator says that it is more supported by foreigners because the implementation is not in favor of the administration.
The creation of the board game was helped by the Max Planck Foundation, which plans to distribute the game free of charge to youth centers. The interest in buying it surprised them.
”These requests came from BiH, from Croatia, from Serbia, from Montenegro, because it seems that they have similar problems,” Nermina Trbonja from the Max Planck Foundation stated.
Due to the slowness in decision-making, all levels of government in BiH have moved the deadline for the implementation of the public administration reform strategy from 2022 to 2027, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
