Sri Mulyani Indrawati talks about the sweeping reforms she introduced in the Ministry of Finance in Indonesia.  She talks about how she took over the Ministry of Finance and built a team that was capable of pushing through challenging reforms. She reflects on the crucial support of Indonesia's president, who backed the tough decisions she needed to make in order to make the Ministry of Finance more effective.  She also talks about the complicated relationship between the Ministry of Finance and Parliament, whose members generally supported reform in the abstract but sometimes balked at the steps she felt needed to be taken, such as raising salaries.  She notes that the reforms maintained the support of the president and other high-level officials because she kept a close eye on costs and benefits; in fact, tax revenue increased sharply after the beginning of the reforms.  In some detail, Mulyani describes the steps she took to tackle corruption.  She made it clear that corruption would not be tolerated, and she fired whole departments where corruption occurred, to send the message that she was serious. She was able to contain patronage pressures by securing the president’s backing for decisions that were expected to draw a backlash from powerful people.  She also made the tough decision to go against cultural norms and the strong bureaucratic esprit de corps, removing poorly performing bureaucrats rather than relocating them or waiting for them to retire.  Throughout these changes, she built a strong and productive relationship with the media, encouraging them to hold her accountable and monitor the activities of her ministry.  She ends with reflections on the importance of building coalitions through consultations, and why authority should be exercised only as a last resort.

Case Study:  Instilling Order and Accountability: Standard Operating Procedures at Indonesia's Ministry of Finance, 2006-2007 

Humberto Falcao Martins offers his perspective on the Brazilian civil service reforms of the 1990s.  He credits Bresser-Pereira for single-handedly putting civil service reform on the agenda.  As a specialist on state an institutional issues in the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, he was involved in the initial review of the Plano Diretor, or blueprint for reform, produced by Bresser-Pereira.  Martins says he was impressed with the decentralization scheme that would create a strategic core, a second group of activities handled exclusively by the state, a third group that would perform activities through partnerships with NGOs and social organizations, and a fourth group focused on market-oriented service provision by state-owned agencies.  Although he recognized the potential of the proposed initiatives, Martins was concerned with reduction of political interference in the implementation stage.  He identifies economists in the government as one of the main sources of opposition, which translated into generalized resistance to the reform.  Divergent views on managerial reform within the executive branch also contributed to resistance.  Martins further argues that consensus building during the drafting process would have circumvented opposition within the civil service.  Operational and legal obstacles plagued the implementation stage as well, but were somewhat successfully addressed in the social organization initiative in which Martins participated personally.  Specific strategies involved passage of constitutional amendments to restructure the civil service, but they came at the cost of increasing opposition.  Martins emphasizes the role of the reform in bringing about a paradigm shift in public administration rather than in effecting specific change.  In that sense, the ultimate result of the Brazilian managerial reform was to inspire other reformers across the country, with the state of Minas Gerais emerging as a paradigmatic success.  In the end, Martins attributes failure of specific implementation to fragmentation arising from concomitant and somewhat divergent views on state reform that were happening at the same time under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Case Study:  Strengthening Public Administration: Brazil, 1995-1998