In 1993, Palermo, Italy, mayor Leoluca Orlando launched an ambitious strategy to reclaim a city from Mafia-related corruption and violence. To move projects forward, however, he had to overcome several obstacles. Nepotism and patronage had created a mismatch between the skills available and the talents required to run the city effectively. Municipal offices lacked adequate records, and information retrieval was difficult and time-consuming. City finances were in shambles. And citizens did not trust the government to get things done and deliver services. Using a landslide electoral victory as an opportunity for major institutional change, Orlando and his cabinet members worked with community leaders to develop a “culture of legality” by cutting the Mafia out of government transactions and transitioning the city from norms of secrecy and bribery to norms of transparency and respect for rules. The administration improved records management, built administrative capacity in key departments, improved budget processes and expanded revenues, increased efficiency and tackled corruption, and started to rebuild the social contract between government and citizens. Those reforms earned Palermo multiple awards, as well as a strong first-time rating (Aa3) from ratings company Moody’s Investors Service. Although some gains slipped after Orlando left office in 2000, his reforms weakened the Mafia’s hold over government. This case study recounts Orlando’s reform efforts at city hall from 1993 to 2000.

Rushda Majeed and Laura Bacon drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Palermo, Italy, in March 2012. Aldo Civico, assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Rutgers University and cofounder of the International Institute for Peace, provided initial ideas and guidance. Roberto Pitea, Valentina Burcheri, and Brian Reilly provided research assistance. Case published September 2012.

 

Associated Interview(s):  Aldo Civico, Guiseppe Ferrante, Francesco Giambrone, Leoluca Orlando

Until 1994, the Brazilian state of Bahia delivered public services with little attention to efficiency or effectiveness. Citizens found it difficult to obtain basic documents like birth certificates, identification cards, and work permits, which were essential to earning a livelihood and participating in political life. Because issuing centers were mainly in urban areas with limited operating hours, citizens in interior areas were underserved, and applicants often had to wait in long lines and visit offices on different floors or shuttle between various buildings to fulfill all requirements. Poor management aggravated the problem. The state government usually placed its worst-performing employees in customer service positions. In 1995, Bahia’s newly elected governor, Paulo Souto, moved to improve service delivery by creating one-stop shops that would provide all kinds of documents under one roof in selected locations throughout the state. Souto’s reform team at the state Secretariat of Administration—the body responsible for public management—worked to enlist the cooperation not only of state agencies but also of national and municipal governments, all of which played roles in processing citizen documents. The state also hired new workers, streamlined procedures, expanded the number of locations, and deployed a fleet of mobile units to increase service access in remote areas. Regular customer-satisfaction surveys indicated the system was highly popular with the public. By 2003, when Souto won reelection, his reforms had not only simplified and accelerated document access but also demonstrated that government could be responsive and accountable to citizens.

In 2003, the new governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil, pledged to improve government efficiency and serve citizens better. Residents of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s fourth-largest state by area and second largest by population, had long bemoaned the difficulty of obtaining such vital documents as work permits, passports, and driver’s licenses, which are issued by a variety of federal, state, and local agencies. In 1996, the state government tried to solve the problem by experimenting with 26 one-stop shops that integrated related citizen services under a single roof, but the shops failed to reduce delay and confusion. From 2007 to 2010, the governor and his reform team restructured and expanded the one-stop shops. The reform team persuaded multiple levels of the government to cooperate more closely, revamped management practices, improved the physical appearance and organization of facilities, streamlined procedures, and installed an electronic monitoring system. Renamed integrated citizen assistance units (unidades de atendimento integrado), the new one-stop shops improved services, reduced delays, and sharply increased processing volume. In 2011, the team outsourced the management of six of the one-stop shops to a private company monitored by the state. The public-private experiment cut per-unit operating costs by 31%. By 2012, 30 one-stop shops were handling more than 6 million citizen transactions annually—more than seven times the annual volume in 2009. By bringing together diverse agencies from multiple levels of government, Minas Gerais was able to greatly improve the reach and efficiency of its citizen services.