Civil service reform

Civil service reform refers to interventions that affect the organisation, performance and working conditions of employees paid from central, provincial or state government budgets. Decolonisation brought a phase of institution building and training programmes for capacity building. Since then, civil service reform has gone through three major phases. The first two were mainly technical interventions. The third has a more political focus.

• The first reforms were largely quantitative. They began in the 1980s, following the structural adjustment programmes supported by the IMF and the World Bank, and focused on 'cutting down to size'. The emphasis was on controlling salary costs, primarily through job reduction, sometimes leading to the retrenchment of serving civil servants.
• The second phase began in the 1990s and presented a broader range of reforms aimed at 'building up', for example, performance assessment, monitoring, transparency, benchmarking, decentralisation, regulation and sound financial management.
• The third (and current) phase was brought about by the apparent failure of stages 1 and 2. The biggest development in thinking about civil service reform has been not in the ‘technology’ of reform, but in the political context in which it is attempted.  Even the World Bank now argues: “Administrative structures and public employment arrangements cannot be considered in isolation. They exist in a political environment – and serve political as well as functional interests. Changes must be considered in the light of winners and losers and who wants what.” (http://tinyurl.com/2pj98a). Another significant feature of the latest stage of civil service reform is a focus on results, particularly in improvements in service delivery.

Only about one-third of civil service reforms attempted by the World Bank and other donors have achieved satisfactory outcomes, and even the “successful” programmes have often not been sustainable. Downsizing and capacity building initiatives have often failed to produce permanent reductions in civil service size or overcome capacity constraints in economic management and service delivery.

Some of the reasons for this limited success are:

• the sheer size of the civil service with its resulting complexity and entrenched power
• its basis as a source of formal employment
• patronage and political support
• the civil service as both agent and subject of reform - that is, the people doing the reform may also be the people who need reforming
• the unacceptability of reform to the people who need to carry out the reform
• poor and inconsistent quality of data on civil service performance, making it difficult to fine tune programmes
• over-emphasis on wage enhancements as a method for performance improvement
• a technocratic approach to reform which assumes that the introduction of formal rules would be sufficient to change behaviour.

There is no universal model of reform. The following documents provide a background to reform and emphasise the importance of the institutional and political context.

Mason, J., 2004, 'Public Administration Reform', practice note, United Nations Development Programme, New York
What makes Public Administration Reform (PAR) a key component in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? What lessons can be learnt from the experience of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in this area? This practice note from UNDP establishes a strategic framework for the support of public administration for democratic governance. It synthesises current thinking and approaches and provides practical guidance and recommendations for public administration programming.
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Manning, N. and Padison, N., 2003, 'International Public Administration Reform: Implications for the Russian Federation', The World Bank, Washington D.C.
What is the best way to tackle administrative reform? What are the key reforms? This research carried out in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Finland, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States by the World Bank identifies key country comparators and relevant variables in order to assist the Russian Federation authorities as they prepare for implementation of the Program for the Reform of the Civil Service System in the Russian Federation. The study concludes that there is at present little international convergence of ideas on administrative reform.
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Rugumyamheto, J. A., 1998, 'Civil Service Reform in Southern and Eastern Africa', Extracts from the Report on Proceedings of a Consultative Workshop held at Arusha, Tanzania, March 4 – 6 1998
What lessons have emerged from recent civil service reform programmes in Eastern and Southern Africa? This paper reports on the findings of a consultative workshop organised by the Civil Service Department (CSD) of the President’s Office in Tanzania. Broadly speaking, reforms often failed because political pressure imposed excessive time and budgetary constraints. Strategic priorities for future programmes include better pay for administrators, greater political commitment to reform and a results-oriented, long-term perspective.
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From the World Bank’s Governance Indicators, the ‘government effectiveness’ indicator is a useful barometer of what observers think of the effectiveness of the civil service in a given country (see http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi2007/). The indicators are for 212 countries for 1996–2006, for six dimensions of governance:

• Voice and Accountability
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence
• Government Effectiveness
• Regulatory Quality
• Rule of Law
• Control of Corruption