As a follow up to her 2009 interview, Sri Mulyani Indrawati revisits her years as Indonesia’s minister of finance to discuss the challenges of building her economic reform team and institutionalizing performance management at the ministry.  She describes how she worked closely with key members of the KPK (Corruption Eradication Commission) to cultivate motivation and teamwork among government employees.  With the support of her reform team, she established institutional mechanisms to reduce corruption and raise the credibility of the government.  And although Indonesia’s bureaucracy proved to challenge the reform team at times, she explains how performance indicators and standard operating procedures were instrumental to identify and overcome weaknesses in the Ministry of Finance.  In conclusion, Sri Mulyani reflects on the more personal attributes required to move sustainable reform forward: a strong vision along with the trust and commitment of her fellow reformers.   She describes the practice of public asset disclosure as one of the most sustainable reforms her team implemented at the ministry. 

Farooq Sobhan talks about the work of his Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, which specializes in training civil servants.  The institute was undertaking to train a core group of mid-level bureaucrats in order to help them develop key management and budgetary skills.  He emphasizes the importance of job stability. Under the system prevalent in Bangladesh, people were transferred between positions frequently and did not get the opportunity to specialize.  Sobhan stresses his belief that those who receive training must be encouraged to stay in positions that will allow them to use their new skills.  He also identifies the problem of students who study abroad and never return, and the need to make the civil service more attractive.  He also reflects on how a politicized civil service is damaging for a country, and shares ideas for depoliticizing a bureaucracy.  He concludes by looking forward to the day when the Bangladeshi civil service has pride of place in society.

Former South African Revenue Service Commissioner Pravin Gordhan describes the internal organizational changes that helped the service consistently meet or exceed its revenue targets during his tenure. Appointed commissioner soon after the service obtained autonomy from South Africa’s civil service regulations, Gordhan talks about how he led a campaign of organizational transformation known as siyakha (“we are building” in Zulu), which reorganized tasks, shifted people within the organization, and led to large-scale racial transformation. The policy depended on aggressive outreach efforts both within the organization and to the public at large. By taking office staff on public campaigns during tax-filing season, Gordhan built public willingness to comply while motivating his employees.

Case Study:  Reworking the Revenue Service: Tax Collection in South Africa, 1990-2009

Sir Peter Kenilorea, speaker of Parliament, describes and evaluates recent efforts to rebuild the Solomon Islands public service, which was near collapse when external intervention ended five years of civil unrest in 2003.  Kenilorea gives a detailed account of his own efforts, together with Taeasi Sanga, clerk of Parliament, and a United Nations Development Programme adviser, Warren Cahill, to strengthen the Parliament Secretariat.  By hiring and training a cohort of recent graduates, Kenilorea and Sanga largely avoided the absenteeism and patronage problems that plagued other parts of the Solomon Islands government.

Case Study:  Starting from Scratch in Recruitment and Training: Solomon Islands, 2004-2009

Manzoor Hasan identifies three main challenges for the Bangladeshi civil service: lack of sufficient training, structural problems arising from a colonial legacy of extensive hierarchization and growing politicization leading to corruption and decreased accountability.  He discusses the curriculum and admission policies of the Master’s Program in Governance and Development at the Institute of Governance Services, which aims to address these concerns.  Its multi-step applicant selection strategy aims to increase representation across genders and sectors of civil service, and to identify candidates who are innovative and willing to forego financial and career advancement objectives during the length of training.  The program thus contributes to a growing pool of qualified Bangladeshi civil servants who will be ready to implement reform when the necessary political vision comes about.  To this end, networking capacity is one of the target skills.  Hasan points to a need to increase governmental commitment to training and reform by  relying on state funding rather than donor funding.  This would counteract a trend toward superficial reform measures by which commissions are set up to issue policy recommendations but few concrete steps are taken.

Rose Kafeero describes the challenges she faced to implement “results-oriented management” reforms in the Ugandan government. While she believes that the mindset changed over the years and that budgets were prepared on the basis of outcomes, she says the impetus for outcome-based performance weakened when some of the managers leading these reforms left agencies. She also did not have full backing from top officials. She believes that other civil service reforms such as downsizing and divestiture of functions have been more successful. She outlines the merit-based selection process at both the national and district levels. She says that universities do not produce skill levels that match government requirements in some categories. She describes the difficulties of recruiting or retaining civil servants in some categories because of low pay and a failure to provide core benefits such as housing.