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Political Commitment to Reform: Civil Service Reform in Swaziland

Author: W McCourt
Date: 2003
Size: 17 pages (159 KB)

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Summary

What factors determine a government’s commitment to implementing political reform? How can international donors identify genuine domestic commitment and generate increased political will where it is lacking? This article from World Development uses a case study of civil service reform in Swaziland to highlight the key elements of local commitment and the means available to donors to engage with a government whose commitment is weak. It argues that strong political leadership and irrevocable reform policies are key factors in assuring implementation, while persuasive, high-level donor engagement with elites can help foster commitment.

Donors’ traditional emphasis on aid conditionality has become increasingly discredited as evidence has demonstrated the central importance of domestic ownership of development programmes. However, if donors focus principally on countries with good records of implementation, other countries with poor policy records – and frequently the greatest need for support – may be overlooked.

Factors traditionally identified as key to political commitment include the strength of the political leadership, the unity and capacity of the reform team and the extent to which the reform plans are voluntary, explicit, challenging, public and irrevocable. However, it has been unclear to what extent these factors are important individually, how they may interact with each other and how country-specific conditions might affect their relative significance.

Analysis of the failure of recent civil service reforms to increase meritocracy and reduce nepotism in Swaziland provides a useful example to examine the commitment model:

• The Swazi Prime Minister showed strong involvement in the reform programme, but, although the reform team was united, it was weak.
• The reform programme was largely voluntary, since Swaziland is not dependent on international aid, and it was publicly announced.
• However, the government failed to make the plans explicit, challenging or irrevocable: it did not specify detailed policy actions and left itself an easy line of retreat from reform.
• At the reform launch, these weaknesses were already detectable and therefore inadequate implementation could have been predicted.
• The government’s ownership of the programme was strong but not sufficient, without the other factors, to ensure commitment.
• The opposition of the Swazi traditional elite to reforms that might threaten their power base may also have hindered the bureaucracy’s capacity to implement.

Since major governance reform in such a stable state as Swaziland is unlikely, the traditional power-bases must be engaged with if administrative reform can be effected. Various methods are open to stakeholders to co-opt the support of elites:

• They should dispense with the fiction that administrative decisions are taken at the administrative level, and persuade political and traditional elites that reform is in their interests.
• Stakeholders can win over elites by arguing that reform will increase government efficiency, address public expectations of reform and reduce dissatisfaction among the bureaucracy, while leaving traditional power-bases unthreatened.
• Donor agencies often have poor relationships at the political level: they might use diplomatic or government contacts to make high-level political contact.
• Donors should undertake follow-up, longitudinal studies of political commitment to correlate initial evidence of commitment with final implementation outcomes.

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Source: McCourt, W., 2003, 'Political Commitment to Reform: Civil Service Reform in Swaziland', World Development, vol. 31, no. 6, p. 1015
Author: Willy McCourt , willy.mccourt@man.ac.uk