By the mid-2000s, Indonesia had recovered from a devastating economic crisis and made significant progress in transitioning from a dictatorship to a democracy. However, the country's vast state bureaucracy continued to resist pressure to improve operations. In 2006, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono tapped economist Sri Mulyani Indrawati to transform Indonesia's massive Ministry of Finance, which was responsible not only for economic policy making but also for taxes and customs. During four years as minister, Mulyani introduced new standard operating procedures, raised civil servant salaries, created a new performance management system, and cracked down on malfeasance. Her reforms turned what had once been a dysfunctional institution into a high performer. But ongoing resistance illustrated the difficulties and perils of ambitious bureaucratic reform in Indonesia.

This case study was drafted by Gordon LaForge based on research by Rachel Jackson, Drew McDonald, Matt Devlin, and Andrew Schalkwyk and on interviews conducted by ISS staff members from 2009 to 2015. Case published May 2016. Other ISS case studies provide additional detail about certain aspects of the reforms discussed in this case or about related initiatives. For example, see Instilling Order and Accountability: Standard Operating Procedures at Indonesia's Ministry of Finance, 2006-2007.

In 1996, Mongolia’s newly elected government, led by a group of market-oriented politicians, decided to reform civil service on the New Zealand New Public Management model, which required managers to sign contracts promising results in exchange for freedom to spend their budgets as they chose. The reforms were intended to modernize a civil service that, while legally changed since democratization in 1990, retained many of the characteristics, and staff, of the previous Soviet-modeled system. Reformers confronted a lack of robust accountability procedures, salary arrears and a lack of central control over local expenditures. The Democratic Coalition government, led by an economic team strongly committed to market-oriented reforms, settled on the contract-based New Public Management model as a way of preserving agency-level decentralization while making agencies’ managers directly accountable to the national government. When enacted, the system met with difficulty at every stage: in specifying outputs for agencies and individuals, in measuring performance, and in rewarding good performance. By 2009, thirteen years after the reforms started, officials reported that the contracts remained largely a formality.

David Hausman wrote this case study based on interviews conducted in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in December 2009. 

Associated Interview(s):  Mendsaikhany Enkhsaikhan

David Hausman drafted this case study on the basis of interviews conducted in Kigali, Rwanda, in March 2010. Case published in July 2011.  Two separate cases, “The Promise of Imihigo: Decentralized Service Delivery in Rwanda, 2006-2010” and “Government Through Mobilization: Restoring Order After Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide," provide additional insight into the processes of restoring and restructuring governance in insecure areas.

Associated Interview(s):  Angelina Muganza, Protais Musoni

Following the peaceful Rose Revolution in November 2003, Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili and State Minister for Reform Coordination Kakha Bendukidze sought to overhaul the country’s Soviet-style bureaucracy, which had become the target of public anger. Borrowing ideas from libertarian, free-market think tanks and the New Public Management model, Bendukidze recruited a staff, eliminated redundant functions in the executive arm of government, consolidated ministries and slashed the size of the civil service. Bendukidze’s vision of limited government complemented Saakashvili’s goal of eliminating corruption by reducing opportunities for bribe taking. Although Bendukidze was instrumental in developing many of the reform policies, his office left the implementation of reforms to individual ministries. This case chronicles the steps that the Georgian government took to reorganize and consolidate its operations, capitalizing on public support in order to make rapid and bold changes.