Kartlos Kipiani

Chief of Staff
Constitutional Court of Georgia
Focus Area(s)
Civil Service
Critical Tasks
Job descriptions
Training
Interviewers
Andrew Schalkwyk
Country of Reform
Georgia
Town/City
Tbilisi
Country
Georgia
Date of Interview
Monday, April 27, 2009
Abstract
Kartlos Kipiani, chief of staff of the Constitutional Court of Georgia at the time of the interview, discusses his time as head of the Public Service Bureau of Georgia and the efforts he was involved in to implement civil service reform projects.  The projects, which were wide-ranging, included efforts to improve technical skills of civil servants and to create a single information-management system across the ministries.  Kipiani also explains the role donors such as the World Bank played in setting the reform agenda.  He discusses the difficulty of dealing with poorly defined and sometimes overlapping government bureaucracies.  He touches on the question of decentralized versus centralized public-administration reform, and he explains why he thinks centralization of reform concepts is important.  He also discusses the difficulties he ran into with attempts to create one codification of job descriptions across all ministries.
 

Full Interview

59MB
Karlos Kipiani Interview
Profile

At the time of this interview, Kartlos Kipiani was the chief of staff of the Constitutional Court of Georgia, a position he held from 2006 until March 2010.  In April 2010 he became deputy head of the Government Chancellery.  He previously served as secretary of the Public Service Council and acting head of the Public Service Bureau.  Kipiani also headed the Division for Civil Service Reform under the previous government in 2000.  He worked on various programs as a coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme.  He first began working for the government in the Office of State Chancellery in 1995.  Kipiani earned a master's degree in public policy from Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Public Policy Studies at Saitama University in 2003.

Keywords
civil service commission
decentralization
Donor Relations
Job descriptions
presidential appointees
ranks and grades
Reform sequencing
technical assistance
training
Not specified