Gregory Ellis, drawing on his experience in reform programs in various countries, discusses general themes in civil reform service across various contexts, especially from the point of view of donor organizations. He emphasizes the need for understanding the political economy of countries undergoing reform, and the need for understanding indigenous customs. He places immense import on the citizen-state relationship in fragile states, and discusses how a state should be involved in service delivery. Ellis especially emphasizes deference to the host nation’s priorities in creating a reform agenda. In discussing capacity building in the Solomon Islands, Ellis reflects upon the dichotomy between service delivery by donors and the sometimes deleterious effect of technical assistance on long-term capacity building. He goes on to discuss restructuring organizations and combating patronage through professional associations, decentralized recruitment and autonomous decision making. Ellis emphasizes especially the role of local consultation, continuity in visionary leadership and long-term commitment in achieving success in fragile states.
At the time of this interview, Gregory Ellis had been a senior operations officer at the Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group at the World Bank for about a year. His parent organization was the Australian Agency for International Development. He was posted by AusAID in the Solomon Islands between 2005 and 2007, as deputy program manager for the Machinery of Government Program, part of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands. Prior to that, between 2000 and 2002 he held a posting in Timor-Leste after the withdrawal of Indonesian forces.
Dwarika Dhungel describes Nepal’s experience with civil service reform as it transitioned from a unitary state ruled by a monarchy to a multi-party parliamentary state evolving toward a decentralized federal system. At the start of this transition, an Administrative Reforms Commission chaired by the prime minister was established. It prepared 116 recommendations to right-size and rationalize the civil service and the organization and functions of government. However, while the commission did its work a large number of civil servants were fired, throwing the reform process into turmoil and the commission chairman resigned. Officials from the political parties then began to politicize the civil service, removing long-time employees and elevating party supporters. At the time of the interview, the Asian Development Bank pressed for some reform and anti-corruption efforts and a new “good governance” law had been enacted, but whether it would be implemented was unknown.
At the time of this interview, Dwarika Dhungel was a senior researcher at the Institute for Integrated Development Studies in Kathmandu, Nepal. He served as Head of the Institute from October 2000 to April 2006. He served in the Nepal Administrative Service (NAS) starting in the 1970s rising from junior officer to the rank of Permanent Secretary. In 1991, he sat on the Administrative Reforms Commission to reorganize Nepal’s civil service. Subsequently he served as secretary to the Administrative Reforms Monitoring Committee. He left the NAS in 1998 and served briefly as a consultant to Transparency International and for the Centre for Democracy and Good Governance (CSDG). In 1999, he was a visiting scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA.
Nitish Kumar was elected chief minister of Bihar, India's poorest state, in December 2005, when the state's government was weighed down by two decades of institutional decline, widespread lawlessness and a society deeply divided by caste and religion. To win the election and to implement his reform agenda, he engineered a grand bargain whereby almost every distinct social group had a share in state-sponsored development. This paved the way for more fundamental reforms in law and order, administration and infrastructure. Although Bihar's more intractable issues remained in 2009, the state had begun turning the corner. Two separate memos, "Clearing the Jungle Raj" and "Reviving the Administration," describe Kumar's efforts to improve law and order and administration in Bihar, respectively.
Rohan Mukherjee drafted this case study on the basis of interviews conducted in Patna, Bihar, in July 2009. Two separate case studies, "Reviving the Administration" and "Clearing the Jungle Raj," describe Kumar's efforts to improve administration and reduce criminal activity, respectively.
Nitish Kumar was elected chief minister of Bihar, India’s poorest state, in December 2005, when the state’s government was weighed down by two decades of institutional decline, widespread lawlessness and a society deeply divided by caste and religion. Improving law and order was a major priority of his new government. The main challenges were rampant criminal activity that curtailed social and economic life, a short-staffed and under-motivated police force, widespread corruption in the ranks, and the poor image of the Bihar police. Using innovative measures, Kumar and his top police officers set out to rid Bihar of its so-called jungle raj, or law of the jungle.
Rohan Mukherjee drafted this policy note on the basis of interviews conducted in Patna, Bihar, in July 2009. Two separate memos, “Coalition Building in a Divided Society” and “Reviving the Administration,” describe Kumar’s efforts to build a coalition for reform and improve administration, respectively.
Between 1998 and 2009, the South African Revenue Service dramatically improved tax compliance. The number of income-tax payers increased to 4.1 million from 2.6 million during the period. Several internal organizational changes helped the revenue service persuade more South Africans to pay their taxes. This case study tells the story of two of those changes in particular: the recruitment of a new cadre of managers from both within and outside the organization and a campaign to provide taxpayers with better service to encourage compliance. The organization used diagnostic tests as well as informal recruiting to rebuild the ranks of upper and middle management, transforming the racial make-up of the organization while improving performance. Meanwhile, in order to improve service for taxpayers, a team of managers and consultants separated back and front offices and introduced an annual "filing season" in which employees of the revenue service left their offices to help taxpayers file their returns. In each of these changes, Pravin Gordhan, revenue-service commissioner from 1999 to 2009, played a central role, both determining policy and overseeing the details of implementation.
David Hausman drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Pretoria, South Africa in February 2010. Case originally published 2010. Additional text added in December 2013.
Agim Selami discusses the obstacles to depoliticizing the civil service in Macedonia. He points to neighboring Slovenia as a model for civil service reform in Macedonia, particularly emphasizing Slovenia's "rightsizing" and merit-based promotions. His views cover the limitations of the Civil Servants Agency, its failure to follow through on enacted legislation, and necessary reforms such as a career system, in which internal candidates are recognized for service and promoted from within. Selami recognizes European Union membership as a driving force for reform in Macedonia and other southeast European states. He also discusses the ethnic representation within the civil service and the lure of higher rates of pay in the nongovernmental sector.
At the time of this interview, Agim Selami was the management coordinator and a research fellow for public administration reform at Analytica, a think tank in Skopje, Macedonia.
Selina Mkony draws upon her extensive experience to discuss the goals of reform in Tanzania and some of the related challenges and issues. She describes the procedures and standards used in the system of recruitment and how this changed over the period of the reform program. She lists some of the criteria used in promotions, including things like seniority, education, skills, and performance management. She underscores the government efforts to move away from nepotism and toward greater transparency in hiring. She also describes the process of and challenges facing performance management and evaluation. Mkony characterizes the sequencing and management of the reform process and relates how the reform process fits in with the goals of streamlining government. She highlights the importance of leadership in controlling and managing reforms. She also touches upon a number of other aspects of civil service reform, including the organizational structure of the civil service, pay policy, training programs, and capacity building. She describes the retrenchment process in the 1990s, ways the government has improved the working environment in order to retain quality people, and the importance of local cultural divisions or language differences and how they impact service delivery.
At the time of this interview, Selina Mkony was program coordinator at the Public Service Management Office in Tanzania. She joined the Civil Service Department in 1994 as an accountant and was later assigned administrative duties as well. The Civil Service Reform Program lasted from 1994 to 1998, when a new program was developed to focus on institution performance management systems and making the public service efficient. She continued on as an accountant and administrator before a new phase began in 2007. At that time, she became the program coordinator.
Kim Sedara comments on international donors who try to import reforms and models of governance into Cambodia without understanding the need to take context into account. He suggests that the task is not to build a system from scratch, but to fix and cure the problems of existing institutions. Referring to the challenges of institution building in his home country, he notes that Cambodia “is still very much in a post-conflict stage.” From the early 1970s to 2009, Cambodia went through at least six major political regimes, leading to numerous “institutional interruptions,” making it very difficult for the state to be responsive and accountable to its citizens, he says. The first challenge was to provide security; the second, food; the third, re-integration of formerly warring factions. He states that a major problem had been a shortage of professional talent, and an educational system poorly designed to correct it. He believes that the rule of law can be achieved only if it is internalized by the population, and that takes time. Sedara says corruption cannot be controlled until people are able to feed themselves and their families from their legitimate earnings. He suggests targeting four major reform areas: courts, the military, administration and public finance. Decentralization and de-concentration are part of administrative reform. Citing a World Bank report, Sedara says that 45 percent of post-conflict societies fall back into civil war within five years of emerging from conflict. Cambodia avoided this fate, and Sedara says he is hopeful for the future.
At the time of this interview, Kim Sedara was a senior researcher at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute, an independent think tank in Phnom Penh. In 1994, he received a degree in archeology in Cambodia and another from the University of Hawaii in 1996. He won a 1998 Fulbright scholarship in 1998 and degrees in economics and political anthropology from the University of Illinois and Stanford. He earned a Ph.D. from Gothenburg University in Sweden in 2005. Sedara has written widely on issues of post-conflict reconstruction, elections, decentralization and deconcentration, and governance in Cambodia.
Deependra Thapa describes the successes and failures of civil service reform efforts in Nepal before, during and after civil conflict. He reports successes in downsizing the bureaucracy and combating corruption. A Web-based personnel information system was installed. However, its use was inhibited by the resistance to change within the bureaucracy, which persisted in doing most transactions on paper. Because of a lack of support from top leadership, installation of a performance management system, with pay and promotion dependent upon outputs, was stymied for similar reasons. When Parliament was suspended during the civil conflict, training for parliamentarians and senior civil servants and officials also came to a halt. Thapa expresses concern that tensions under the coalition government at the time of the interview meant that little attention and few resources would be paid to achieve the ambitious civil service reform goals the government originally set for itself in 1999.
At the time of this interview, Deependra Thapa was Nepal's secretary of education, a position he had held for less than a year. Earlier, he was secretary of the Ministry of General Administration, where he had served for two years as national program officer in charge of the civil service reform program. Since entering the civil service in 1997, he also served in the ministries of tourism, environment, operations, transportation and labor and in the office of the prime minister.
Amos Sawyer discusses the Liberian experience with decentralization, land reform and public sector reform. He speaks about further complications, including the aftermath of war and the role of property in exacerbating it; the inefficacy of, and lack of trust in, the judicial department; the unavailability of representative opinion polls; and the relationship between property holdings and women’s empowerment. Sawyer begins by explaining the goals of land reform in the country, and the tortuous process of building support for land reform among the populace, nongovernmental organizations, international donors and the cabinet, and building credibility for the government. Sawyer reflects on public-sector reform and the challenges of coordinating reform throughout the government, especially in relation to patronage and ghost workers. He speaks about corruption reform in the police, judiciary and bureaucracy through the Anti-Corruption Commission, and its effect on institutional memory. Sawyer also reflects in detail about the role of international donor agencies, and the need for contextually sound goals, implemented with patience through cooperation instead of myopic adherence to narrow goals. Lastly, he discusses the role of spoilers in the Liberian reform process, and emphasizes the necessity for visionary leadership.
At the time of the interview, Amos Sawyer was chairman of the Governance Commission in Liberia, which was set up under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2003. He was the president of the Interim Government of National Unity in Liberia between 1990 and 1994. Sawyer earned a doctoral degree in political science from Northwestern University, and after his presidency was a research scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington. He also wrote two books: Beyond Plunder: Toward Democratic Government in Liberia, and The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy and Challenge.