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.

 

Case Study:  Delivering on the Hope of the Rose Revolution: Public Sector Reform in Georgia, 2004-2009