Integrated Municipal Asset Management Model for Bosnia and Herzegovina

Cities and municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) own or control much of the country’s local infrastructure, but audit and diagnostic evidence suggest that few can link the legal title, physical condition, accounting value and service role of those assets. This working paper asks what that evidence shows, how far it can be generalised, and what operating model could close the gap within BiH’s divided legal and accounting framework. It combines four sources: (i) 115 financial audit reports on 93 local governments for 2008–2016, screened with a rule-based coding protocol; (ii) nine official audits for 2023–2024 used as a validation check; (iii) BiH-specific assessments by the OSCE, PEFA, the IMF and UNDP; and (iv) a structured review of international guidance and peer-reviewed research. Flags for unrecorded or misclassified assets, deficient inventories and missing asset registers recur across the historic corpus, and the recent audits show the same weaknesses, notably unrecorded local roads, unreconciled subledgers and long-standing assets under construction. The paper proposes the BiH Integrated Municipal Asset Management Model (BiH-IMAM), which links a common asset information standard, mandatory legal and lifecycle decision gates and a proportional operating form for small municipalities, and it sets out a costed 12-month pilot with an evaluation design. Because the corpus is historic, non-random and not fully validated, its counts indicate recurrence rather than prevalence, and the paper does not estimate the value of municipal assets nationally.