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Towards ‘Cognitively Complex’ Problem-Solving: Six models of Public Service reform

Willy McCourt1

Abstract

This paper proposes ‘cognitively complex problem-solving’ as a refinement of the recent problem-

solving approach to public service reform, and as an addition to existing political and institutional

explanations for the frequent failure of reform. In order to substantiate the new problem-solving model,

it identifies and selectively reviews six models of reform that have been practiced in developing countries

over the past half- century: public administration; decentralization; pay and employment reform; New

Public Management; integrity and corruption reforms; and “bottom-up” reforms. A short case study of

Myanmar is presented to illustrate the problem-solving approach in practice.

1. Introduction: Facing up to failure

When Apollo declared through his Oracle at Delphi that no one was wiser than Socrates, what the god

was trying to get across (at least according to Socrates himself, who declined to take the compliment at

face value) was that ‘The wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in respect of

wisdom he is really worthless’ (Plato, 1969: 52). To say that what we know about public service reform

is ‘worthless’ would be an exaggeration. But a confession of our relative ignorance may still be the

beginning of wisdom. It will be fruitful if it helps us to frame the problem that faces us in a way that

stimulates readers to propose approaches that stand a better chance of success than the ones we have

been following up to now. That is what this paper tries to do.

2. Evidence and explanations: Politics and institutions

2.1 Evidence

The most robust evidence that we have of reform outcomes is in the form of World Bank project

evaluation reports. The Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) found that that only 33% of the

public service reform projects completed between 1980 and 1997 had been rated as satisfactory (IEG,

1999). When IEG revisited the topic nine years later, public sector reform was rated joint eighth among

the Bank’s twelve project sectors in terms of project success, and its success rate had declined over the

1 Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Email: [email protected]

This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not beenthrough the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi:10.1111/dpr.12306 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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previous five years more sharply than all but one of the other eleven sectors (IEG, 2008: xiii and 83).

Reviewing overlapping evidence just before the first IEG evaluation, Nunberg (1997) found that the

success rate was lower than for Bank projects as a whole.

We should keep these negative findings in perspective. World Bank projects are a skewed sample. The

Bank operates predominantly in low- and middle-income countries where reform is difficult. The

Bank’s own finding that its civil service reform projects have a poorer track record than other kinds of

public service reform (such as public financial reform) disappears when we allow for the fact that they

are disproportionately located in poor and unstable countries (Blum, 2014). The Bank's perspective

when it evaluates its projects is not necessarily the same as that of the beneficiaries or other

stakeholders. Moreover, failure is by no means the exclusive prerogative of civil service reform, or

even international development. Business start-ups in the US funded by venture capital have a failure

rate of anything from 25 to 75%. Public policy failures in the UK have been common enough to provide

the material for a substantial recent book (Gage, 2012; King and Crewe, 2013).

However, even if we amend ‘relatively poor’ to ‘relatively not bad’, the outcomes have not been good

enough. Moreover, the ‘frequent failures’ and the perception of public service reform as ‘out of fashion

or too difficult in practice’ (IEG, 2008: xvi; 65) – as recently as 2010, an internal Bank paper carried the

title, Why do Bank-supported public service reform efforts have such a poor track record? – are likely to

have a chilling effect on activity if not addressed.2

In this paper, we briefly review two existing

explanatory factors, politics and institutions, before proposing a third factor of our own, cognitive

complexity, which we illustrate through a discussion of alternative models of public service reform.

2.2 Politics

While IEG’s remedial recommendations in 1999 were mainly technocratic and piecemeal, by 2008, IEG

was identifying ‘political feasibility’ as a key factor. (Similarly, political commitment to reform by client

governments had pride of place in Nunberg’s 1997 review.) This emphasis on politics reflected the

political economy studies of the structural adjustment era, based on which the Bank’s 1998 Assessing

Aid report concluded that ‘Successful reform depends primarily on a country’s institutional and political

characteristics’ (World Bank, 1998: 53; see also Campos and Esfahani, 2000; Johnson and Wasty, 1993;

and Nelson, 1990). The management of the Bank and IMF took the lesson to heart, with the Bank’s

2 In the author’s personal experience as a practitioner, this is already happening.

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President at the time, James Wolfensohn (1999: 9), remarking that

‘It is clear to all of us that ownership is essential. Countries must be in the driver’s seat

and set the course. They must determine goals and the phasing, timing and sequencing

of programs.’

After the dawning of that realization on the international development agencies in the late 1990s, the

decade of the 2000s could be called the decade of politics, with the Swedish and UK governments, and

the World Bank, all sponsoring studies of the politics of reform (Dahl-Østergaard et al., 2005), and with

one of the largest US development consulting companies employing as many specialists in politics as in

public administration (Cooley, 2008). The studies pointed to generic factors like technical capacity,

insulation from societal interests and building incentives for politicians to embark on reform; and

country- specific factors like the importance of public society and the media (Duncan et al., 2003;

Robinson, 2007).

2.3 Institutions3

The Assessing Aid report highlighted institutional as well as political characteristics, and they are a

second group of factors which affect the success of reform. Tanzania’s legal framework for public staff

management illustrates their subtle influence. The Constitution, and both primary and secondary

legislation enacted over several decades, give the President immense direct powers, with few

procedural checks on how he exercises them. For example, the Public Service Act, 2002 states that

‘(any) delegation (to the Public Service Commission (PSC)... shall not preclude the President from

himself exercising any function which is the subject of any delegation or authorization.’ Further, ‘The

President may remove any public servant from the service of the Republic if the President considers it in

the public interest to do so.’ An earlier Act states that ‘Whether the President validly performed any

function conferred on him... shall not be inquired into by or in any court.’4

As a consequence, Tanzania’s senior officials have little job security. One of them remarked that ‘the

President changes the top officers in the service in a similar way as (sic) he changes attire.’ Yet

3 I use ‘institutions’ in this paper to refer to the formal laws and agencies of the state (such as a Civil Service Law or an

Election Commission), and not the informal institutions of society (such as the family). 4 http://bunge.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/8-2002.pdf; http://polis.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/16-1989.pdf.

http://bunge.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/8-2002.pdf

http://polis.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/16-1989.pdf

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increasing their security, or restoring the independence of the PSC, would require both a constitutional

amendment and the revision or repeal of many separate laws and procedures; and, they, in turn,

w o u l d r e q u i r e ‘political commitment’ of the kind which we discussed in the previous section. (Bana

and McCourt, 2006)

2.4 Beyond politics and institutions

We have discussed politics and institutions quite briefly, not because they are minor factors, but

because they are quite well understood by now (which is not to say, of course, that they have invariably

translated into the practice of governments and development agencies). However, they do not provide

an exhaustive explanation for reform outcomes. Organizations can succeed while others are failing

within a single political dispensation (Grindle, 1997; Tendler, 1997). Similar institutions such as the

Commonwealth public service commissions which are responsible for appointing and, sometimes,

managing public staff have had different outcomes in different countries (McCourt, 2003 and 2007). If

we now focus for the remainder of this paper on another group of factors, we do so in an additive spirit.

We acknowledge the political and institutional factors, but we suggest that they leave a significant

explanatory residue.

3. Cognitively complex problem-solving

What is the residue, and how should we deal with it? This paper proposes a problem-solving approach,

viewing the different reform interventions as ways of dealing with the problem situation as different

national governments have defined it. ‘Problem situation’ is borrowed from Karl Popper (1989: 129;

and 1999). Popper argues that at any given point in the history of science, there is an agenda which

arises from problems which current theories have created or failed to solve: ‘You pick up, and try to

continue, a line of inquiry which has the whole background of the earlier development of science behind

it.’ Similarly, it seems to us that at any given point in the development of public administration in a

particular country, there is an agenda of problems which the previous experience of reform has created,

and which confronts the most perceptive national policy-makers and other stakeholders.5

This paper is not alone in adopting a problem-driven approach. It follows Fritz et al. (2009), who have

already applied it to political economy. Andrews (2013) has developed an alternative and more

55 Cf. Fritz et al. (2009).

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elaborate problem-solving model in parallel with this paper. This paper arguably refines their

approaches in one respect. Readers will be familiar with the saying that ‘If the only tool you have is a

hammer, then every problem becomes a nail.’6 Identifying a problem, or problem situation, is not an

end in itself. We must propose a solution. And when we do so, at least in the experience of the present

writer, we tend to fall back on the tools in our reform toolbox; all too often, reform problems do get

treated as ‘nails.’ In a globalized world, most reform does not start from first principles, but in the light

of previous reforms in other places (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). In other words, the suggestion is that

public service reforms have sometimes failed because of the reformers’ cognitive narrowness.

The notion of 'cognitive complexity' is borrowed from psychology, where it is defined as

'an aspect of a person's cognitive functioning which at one end is defined by the use of

many constructs with many relationships to one another (complexity) and at the other

end by the use of few constructs with limited relationships to one another (simplicity)

(Cervone and Pervin, 2015).

People with a large set of interpersonal constructs tend to have better social perception skills than those

with a relatively small set. (Delia et al., 1982).

This psychological finding has been applied to in organization studies, in work which emphasizes the

value in decision-making of a range of perspectives. A wide ‘information range’ makes it easier to spot

problems and opportunities, or reframe problems that have been intractable up to now (Bolman and

Deal, 2003; George, 1972; Mitroff and Emshoff, 1979). It contributes to the ‘cognitive complexity’ of

reformers; their ability to entertain a range of options and engage in what Weick (1993), drawing on

Lévi-Strauss, has called ‘bricolage’, rather than defaulting to a ‘best practice’ solution of the kind

criticized by Grindle (2007), Rodrik (2008) and many others.7

To be sure, cognitive complexity is not a sufficient condition for policy success, which also entails such

features as ethical understanding and some finesse in action (Bartunek et al., 1983; Denison et al.,

1995). However, it seems plausible to suggest that it is a necessary one.

6 It was actually coined by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who some readers will recognize as the

creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of (psychological) needs. 7 See also Wilkinson (2006) on the related concept of tolerance of ambiguity as an attribute of successful leaders.

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4. Models of public service reform

In applying a ‘cognitively complex’ approach to problem-solving, we cannot make bricks without

straw. If we are serious about respecting the specific priorities of developing country policymakers,

and compensating for past cognitive deficiencies, then we will need a variety of tools. We flesh out

the approach by a selective review of the experience of public service reform in developing countries.

'Reform' is necessarily a broad term. Public service reform has been defined as ‘interventions that

affect the organization, performance and working conditions of employees paid from central,

provincial or state government budgets.’8

It can be seen as policies implemented by public agencies with the intention of improving some

aspect of the functioning of that agency. In this article, it will be defined operationally as the six

reform 'families' which are listed in Table 1.

In keeping with our problem-solving approach, the origin of reform is located in problems which

policymakers pose to themselves, or which circumstances thrust upon them.9 Abstracting from the

practice of developing country governments over recent decades, six major problems are identified;

and six families of reform are listed as attempted solutions.

Table 1: Public Service Reform Problems and Models

Problem Model Main Action Period

1. How can we put government on an orderly and efficient footing?

‘Weberian’ public administration and capacity- building

Post-independence period in south Asia and sub- Saharan Africa

2. How can we get government closer to the grassroots?

Decentralization 1970s to present

8 http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/civil-service-reform. 9 Many others have recognized that governments tailor approaches to their circumstances: see for example Nunberg

(1997: 14); and Turner (2002).

http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/civil-service-reform

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3. How can we make government more affordable?

Pay and employment reform 1980s and 1990s

4. How can we make government perform better and deliver on our key objectives?

New Public Management 1990s to present

5. How can we make government more honest?

Integrity and anti- corruption reforms

1990s to present

6. How can we make government more responsive to citizens?

‘Bottom-up’ reforms Late 1990s to present

This stance aligns us unequivocally with those who prioritize context over ‘best practice’. We pay

respect to successful reform models. But they must be understood in terms of the environment in

which they have arisen; or, in the language used in this paper, in terms of the ‘problem situation’ as

particular policymakers have perceived it. We reject the tendency of some international reform

brokers to treat reform models as ‘widgets’ (Joshi and Houtzager, 2012) which can be transferred

unaltered without regard to the environments that they are transferred from and to. That point will

be emphasized throughout this paper.

Emphasizing context means recognizing that ‘vice may be virtue uprooted,’ in the words of the Anglo-

Welsh poet David Jones (1974: 56). It is not appropriate to express a preference for any of the

approaches listed in Table 1, all of which are already normative rather than descriptive (the list does

not include perverse problems which have absorbed some officials’ attention such as how to make

government a vehicle for rent-seeking or patronage). I hope instead to provide enough detail for

readers to decide what they have to offer in terms of the ‘problem situation’ in readers’ own

countries or the countries with which they are concerned.

This simple problem-solving approach should not be taken too literally. First, our models are what

Weber called ‘ideal types’. They are abstracted from reality for analysis. Likewise, the periodization

of the third column in the table should be handled with a light touch. Governments did not suddenly

discover honesty in the 1990s, and particular governments started pay and employment reform for

the first t i m e o n l y in the 2000s (Morocco) or even later (Serbia). However, there have been

periods when particular questions have dwelt on policymakers’ minds. Public policy questions arise in

the order they do partly because external shocks like the oil price rises of the 1970s foist them on

policy-makers’ attention. But they also arise as reactions to the unintended consequences of the

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previous generation of reforms (here again we follow Popper, for whom managing unintended

consequences was the essence of public policy).10 The bureaucratization that was the unintended

consequence of Weberian public administration created the need for decentralization. The

expansion of state capacity had the unintended consequence of creating a fiscal burden which pay

and employment reform was framed to relieve.

Context has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. An administration’s ‘problem situation’ is

dynamic. By solving one problem we always create another as an unintended consequence.

Moreover, just as grouping public service reform approaches in terms of policy problems provides a

convenient structure for the paper, so the periodization outlined in Table One gives us a convenient

order in which to address the approaches.

There is insufficient space in this paper to deal with all six of the approaches. We shall discuss

Approaches One, Four and Six in turn: Approaches Four and Six will be relevant to the Myanmar case

presented later in the paper. (For Approach Two, see Evans (2003); and Turner and Hulme (1997); for

Three, see McCourt, 2001b; and Lindauer and Nunberg, 1994; for Five, see Klitgaard, 1988.)

5. ‘Weberian’ public administration and capacity building

We shall deal with this briefly, since many readers are already familiar with it.

5.1 Bureaucracy and (neo)patrimonalism

The public administration model in developing countries is essentially the classic Weberian model of

bureaucracy harnessed to the needs of the developmental state. The German sociologist Max Weber

located its origins, for both the public and private sectors, in the growth and complexity of the tasks of

modern organizations; and also in democratization, which created an expectation that citizens, and

members of an organization, would be treated equally. The main features of the model are:

 A separation between politics and elected politicians on the one hand and administration and

appointed administrators on the other

10 See also Merton (1936). Merton and Popper seem to have come up with the idea independently of each other.

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 Administration is continuous, predictable and rule-governed

 Administrators are appointed on the basis of qualifications, and are trained professionals

 There is a functional division of labor, and a hierarchy of tasks and people

 Resources belong to the organization, not to the individuals who work in it

 Public servants serve public rather than private interests (Minogue, 2001)

There are partial exceptions, for example the socialist countries of East Asia such as Lao PDR and

Vietnam, which do not recognize the separation of administration and politics. But in practical terms,

administrations that follow the Weberian model – and almost all do pay at least lip service – begin by

putting in place a system of rules. Where staffing is concerned, we can expect to find a compendium of

posts, arranged in a hierarchy according to rank, with statements of the duties expected of each post (in

some countries this is called a ‘scheme of service’). There will be clear guidelines about how the posts

should be advertised and filled, how pay grades are determined, and so on. The rules and guidelines

will be overseen by central agencies such as the finance ministry and the public service commission or

similar body. There will be similar rules for the control of government spending, overseen by the

relevant central body, such as a procurement agency (Schick, 1998).

Administration tends to be highly centralized: the model posits an unbroken hierarchical chain from the

top (in the capital) to the bottom (in the remotest outpost of government). The tendency is to focus on

inputs, in the sense of the efficient management of resources rather than outputs in the sense of the

goods and services that the resources are used to produce, let alone outcomes in the sense of the social

and economic results that derive from the outputs.

Bureaucracy has of course a bad name in the popular imagination. However, a study commissioned by

the World Bank in the run-up to its 1997 World Development Report found a close statistical connection

between public bureaucracy and economic growth. Their data suggested that merit-based recruitment

was the most important bureaucratic element, followed by promotion from within and career stability

for public servants (Evans and Rauch, 1999). Further support for meritocracy came from a more

detailed study of personnel management in the Kyrgyz and Slovak republics and in Romania. It

highlighted the importance of sound administrative procedures underpinning merit, very much as

outlined here (Anderson et al., 2003). So we have recent evidence that Weber’s century-old insight was

basically sound: the bureaucratic model was indeed the efficient successor to patrimonial regimes which

had centered on the personal and arbitrary power of an absolute ruler.

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But there are a number of pre-conditions which may need to be in place for the model to produce the

results that Weber anticipated. Let us mention two. The first is a culture in which rules are respected

and followed. (This point has been emphasized by Schick. We expand on it later in this paper.)

A second condition is that the Weberian rules should not be undermined by patronage pressures.

Weber did not anticipate that bureaucracy and patrimonialism would become fused in the hybrid of

‘neopatrimonialism’, where state resources are diverted for patronage purposes such as securing

support in an election. This neopatrimonial hybrid is widespread, having been identified in modern

times in places as far apart as Greece, and Chicago in the United States (Clapham, 1982).

As the state developed, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be an attempt to use its growing

resources in the same way that ‘traditional’ patrons used private resources: to co-opt supporters and

ensure their loyalty (McCourt, 2007). But the neopatrimonial twist was that patronage operated by a

single, visible patron mutated into patronage operated by political parties and other broad groupings,

often organized on a national scale. With many individuals implicated at different levels, this stubborn

neopatrimonial bush with its complex root system could be even harder to eradicate than its relatively

simple patrimonial predecessor. Much recent reform effort has been devoted, either explicitly or

implicitly, to the task of eradication.

5.2 Capacity building

A distinctive feature of public administration in developing countries is that unlike industrialized

countries, where capacity evolved gradually, developing countries have put in place crash programmes

of capacity-building following independence and, more recently, armed conflict and state collapse. The

programmes have centered on staff training and development. The assumption is that public

administration is deficient because public administrators lack skills which can be readily imparted

through training. The ‘training and visit’ system for agriculture extension workers was a typical

example. In the context of a fixed programme of field visits overseen by their supervisors, extension

workers received frequent one-day training sessions to impart the three or four most important

agricultural recommendations that they should pass on to farmers in the following few weeks (Hulme,

1992).

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There is no doubt that capacity affects performance, as even politically-orientated studies such as

Nelson’s (1990) recognize. But we have learned that capacity-building is a broad concept with a political

dimension (Boesen and Therkildsen, 2005). Moreover, it is rarely effective in an organizational vacuum.

For example, capacity-building at the individual level usually takes place on training courses, away from

the workplace. Learning designs need to make a bridge from training to the ‘action environment’ of

work - its organizational culture, management practices and communication networks - in the form of

action plans, supervisor involvement and post-training review arrangements (Grindle and Hilderbrand,

1995; McCourt and Sola, 1999).

6. New Public Management (NPM)

6.1 Elements of NPM

In terms of the periodization outlined in Table 1, NPM is the reform model which succeeded the public

administration model. Of course, there was continuity as well as change in the succession. The OECD’s

(1995) review of public management developments, published at the high tide of NPM, includes

initiatives to improve management of HR, something that the Weberian model also emphasizes in its

own way. The essential change, however, was from the public administration doctrine of regular,

predictable and rule-governed behavior to behavior that was driven by performance.

The public administration doctrine tends to assume that if a sound framework of rules is put in place

and public servants are persuaded to adhere, adequate performance will follow. But the governments

that went down the NPM road were setting their sights on better rather than adequate performance.

Moreover, continuing pressure to restrain public expenditure meant that better performance could be

bought only up to a point, and although the stimulus of competition was introduced (as we shall see), it

became clear that there were limits to its use, intrinsic or political as the case may be. Thus, the

application of management techniques became the formula deployed to square the circle of

government that worked better while costing no more (Pollitt, 1993).

NPM in practice has been driven by four management imperatives: delegation, performance,

competition and responsiveness to clients. Delegation has had two aspects. First, there is the hiving off

of responsibilities to the private sector through privatization, especially of industries which had

previously been nationalized; and the consequent emergence of elaborate frameworks for regulating

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them in the public interest. Second, there is the devolution of management authority to lower levels in

the public sector hierarchy.

Privatization and regulation are outside the scope of this paper, and we have already dealt with

‘devolving authority’ in the section above on administrative decentralization. We shall now discuss the

remaining two imperatives: improving performance and providing responsive service.

6.2 Improving performance

The NPM approach to ensuring performance hinges on the formulation and measurement of

performance indicators. In the early days of NPM, such indicators usually addressed the internal

operations of individual agencies. In a typical example, Denmark’s national library undertook to

increase productivity by 10 percent, increase the number of transactions by 2.5 percent annually and

put purchases prior to 1979 on computer, all by the end of 1996 (OECD, 1995: 35). Subsequently, the

technology of monitoring performance has grown sophisticated, with performance management

indicators that are outcome- rather than output- or input-based (different from the Weberian model in

this respect), and which generate elaborate performance data. Performance management is also widely

practiced by international development agencies: in a sense, the Millennium Development Goals are

performance management on a global scale (Goldsmith, 2011).

Public administration, as a rule, leans lightly on theoretical support. But advocates of performance

indicators can point to plentiful evidence for their value from organizational psychology. Locke et al.,

surveying numerous empirical studies, characterize goal-setting theory, whose essential claim is that

setting goals improves performance, as ‘among the most scientifically valid and useful theories in

organizational science’ (1991: 370). Not just any old goal, though: research shows that goals should be

specific and challenging. Those who have to reach them should be committed to doing so, and should

receive support and encouragement, and feedback on their performance, as they work towards them

(Locke and Latham, 1990).

The application of goal-setting in the public sector, in the form of target regimes with their 'key

performance indicators', has not been without problems, as the UK experience shows. If agencies are

given incentives to reach challenging targets, there will tend to be 'gaming': agencies may take short

cuts to hit the targets. Agencies may have a perverse incentive to perform sub-optimally (a ‘threshold

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effect’), fearful that if they exceed the initial targets, the bar will be set higher next time round (a

‘ratchet effect’). Accordingly, UK hospital ambulances have been found to wait in queues outside the

hospital until the hospital was sure that the Accident and Emergency department could see the patient

within its four-hour maximum waiting time target (Bevan and Hood, 2006); while 21% of UK police

officers in a 2014 survey reported pressure from senior officers to misreport crimes, again in order to

meet government crime reduction targets (McCourt, 2014a).

Malaysia is perhaps the most elaborate example of performance management in the public sector

among developing countries, and can be described as a success, allowing for reservations noted below

(McCourt, 2012). Its National Key Result Areas are the numerical indicators for the Governance

Transformation Programme which was the Barisan Nasional government’s response to its poor

performance in the 2008 election, when the Opposition tapped public anxieties on crime, corruption

and the economy. (So it is an intensely political initiative.) Its first annual targets, widely publicized,

included a 20% reduction in street crime, and an improvement in Malaysia’s score on Transparency

International’s Corruption Perceptions Index from 4.5 to 4.9.

In the event, there was a reported reduction in street crime of 37% by the end of 2010. The CPI score

languished initially at 4.4, but the 4.9 target was met the following year when TI announced its latest

annual index. Moreover, mindful that it should not be judge and jury in its own case, the Malaysian

government assembled an international panel in January 2011 to review its progress. Its members

included an Australian public service commissioner, an IMF Resident Representative and a co-founder of

Transparency International. They were fulsome: ‘a great success,’ ‘impressive,’ ‘extraordinary’

(PEMANDU, 2011: 199, 200, 202).

However, reservations should be entered. First, there are holes in the data; PEMANDU has not

recorded performance systematically. Second, apart from the possibility of a Hawthorne effect11, given

that Malaysia’s initiative was still at a relatively early stage at the time of writing, there is the scope for

gaming as occurred in the UK. There is no evidence of this in Malaysia, but the theoretical concern is

reflected in the international panel’s report, which recommended that the statistics should be audited

‘to preserve authenticity and validity’ (PEMANDU, 2011: 206; see also McCourt, 2012). Their

recommendation is reflected in the UK's creation of an independent Office of National Statistics, whose

role in regulating public agencies' performance statistics has reduced the gaming which occurred during

11 Readers unfamiliar with this term may consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

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the early period of target regimes (McCourt, 2014b).

6.3 Developing Competition

The impression of a traditional bureaucracy where, to invoke the celebrated NPM distinction, both

‘steerers’ and ‘rowers’ were exclusively fully paid-up public servants is misleading. A proportion of

public work was always contracted out to the private and voluntary sectors, not only in fringe areas like

the placing of newspaper advertisements, but also strategic capital projects for the construction of

motorways, buildings and so on. In Germany the application of the subsidiarity principle made this

inevitable (Reichard, 1997). The difference which NPM makes is to remove bureaucrats’ discretion,

making contracting out obligatory, and thereby increasing its scope and extent.

Contracts awarded competitively are, in a sense, performance indicators ‘with teeth’. A weakness of

purely internal ‘service level agreements’ based on performance indicators is the lack of effective

sanctions if the agreement is broken, since the internal supplier knows that the internal customer has

nowhere else to go (Greer, 1994). By contrast, a contracting régime uses competition or the threat of

competition to enhance performance at three stages: in the initial bidding for the contract, in

monitoring compliance and in re-bidding at the end of the contract period. In this way, as one

sympathetic account from New Zealand maintains, provision becomes results-driven, transparency and

accountability are ensured and – not least – responsiveness to voice increases because customer

feedback really matters. In New Zealand, consequently, delivery of local authority services by external

providers jumped from 22 to 48 percent of provision between 1989 and 1994 (Boston et al., 1996).

6.4 Providing responsive service

With its emphasis on management techniques as a spur to performance, NPM operates from the top

down, which militates against responsiveness. The oddity of managing service performance over the

heads of its beneficiaries has been compensated for through devices like ‘citizen’s charters’ which set

out minimum standards of service that clients can expect, based on principles such as:

 quality — improving the quality of services

 choice — wherever possible

 standards — specify what to expect and how to act if standards are not met

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 value — for the taxpayers’ money

 accountability — individuals and organizations

 transparency — rules/procedures/schemes/grievances

They have been introduced in many countries, including India. However, the experience has been

mixed, not only in developing countries (Sharma and Agnihotri, 2001), but also in the UK, where the

charter movement began. The UK Citizen's Charters were a flagship initiative of Prime Minister John

Major, yet only 16 out of 1,000 Britons polled at their height in the mid-1990s were both familiar with a

Charter and satisfied with it (O’Conghaile, 1996). The criticism arose that lip-service was being paid to

citizens’ views, and that the charters reflected the priorities of managers, not citizens (Clarke and

Newman, 1997).

The involvement of non-state providers is probably of greater significance than ‘managerialist’ initiatives

such as citizen’s charters. In this paper we are not interested in stand-alone service provision, whether

by NGOs, for-profit providers or donors, even though in some countries there are areas such as water

and sanitation where private provision predominates, but in services that are contracted by or actively

aligned with state service provision. Experience here has been mixed yet again, and probably more

negative than positive. An early study of contracting for clinical and ancillary services in the health

sector found problems created by the limited capacity of slow-moving, rule-ridden bureaucracies to

perform even very basic functions such as paying contractors in a timely manner (Mills et al., 2001). A

more recent comprehensive survey echoed that finding, and noted that formal policy dialogue between

government and non-state providers was often imperfect and unrepresentative, especially in fragile

settings, and sometimes unduly dominated by the provider side (Batley and Mcloughlin, 2010).

6.5 The appropriateness of NPM

NPM has been described as ‘truly a global paradigm’ (Borins, 1997: 65) whose spread is impeded only by

bureaucratic isolationism (Thompson, 1997: 13). However, the contributors to a comprehensive review

in 2001 found that its incidence in developing countries was limited (McCourt and Minogue, 2001), and

that picture has probably not changed a great deal in the last decade. The problem-solving approach

taken in this paper suggests an explanation. If NPM is essentially a response to the problem of

improving performance and delivering on a government’s objectives, then a prior condition for its

application must be that government makes improving performance a priority.

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Whether performance is or even ought to be a priority was the subject of a debate over the application

of the New Zealand version of NPM (New Zealand was a market leader in the early days of NPM). Bale

and Dale (1998), as advocates, argued that the New Zealand reforms were relevant to developing

countries because they were developed from a broad, system-wide perspective that focused on the

causes, not the symptoms, of dysfunctionality, and because having specified the performance standards

that the center expected, the reforms devolved to line agencies the management authority that they

would need to meet the standards. However, they conceded that some stringent conditions were also

necessary: a politically neutral, competent public service; little corruption or nepotism; a functioning

legal code and political market; and a competent private sector.

Answering Bale and Dale’s case, Schick (1998) argued that Bale and Dale were taking for granted the

earlier stage of New Zealand’s bureaucratic development where a framework of rules and a culture of

following them had been implanted. By contrast, he went on, developing country public administration

was typically informal, with local managers having virtual impunity to override formal procedures.

Deliberately weakening those procedures, which were weak in the first place, in the interests of giving

managers ‘the right to manage’, would fatally exacerbate the very problems which NPM wanted to

solve.

In terms of the problem-solving framework adopted in this paper, Schick’s objection is that NPM is a

First World solution to the First World problem of improving public sector performance, something that

industrialized country governments have the luxury of doing because by deploying the Weberian model

much earlier in their history, they have already solved the problem of how to put government on an

orderly and efficient footing. Developing countries should follow the same sequence, in Schick’s view:

walk before they try to run.

We do not need to take sides in the debate. However, it illustrates – and not for the first time in this

paper - the importance of tailoring reform to the context in which it is taking place.

7. Bottom-Up Reforms

7.1 Towards empowerment

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Both the models we have presented so far share an assumption: that when it comes to setting priorities

for public management, public managers should be in the driving seat. Reform should come from the top

down – just as it did with India’s citizen’s charters and Malaysia’s National Key Result Areas. Indeed a

great deal of reform effort has gone into ensuring that managers are in the driving seat, insulated from

clientelistic pressures from society and politicians.

That view has changed dramatically. We can see Peter Evans’ (1995) Embedded Autonomy as the first

crack in the monolith, through its recognition that East state officials’ effectiveness depended on a dense

network of ties with the private sector and civil society. Evans labeled this distinctive relationship

‘embedded autonomy’ because although officials were ‘embedded’ in social ties, they retained some

aloofness, informed but not instructed by their social interlocutors. The bureaucrats stayed in the driving

seat, even if they now had industrialists and civil society in the passenger seat next to them.

But, arriving just a little after Evans’ seminal work, a new fashion12 for participation increased the

influence of civil society. In this bottom-up approach, policy priorities were to come directly from

citizens, placing public officials in a responsive or even passive posture. The World Bank’s landmark

Voices of the Poor report found that public agencies were among the most important but also the least

effective institutions in poor people’s lives. The Report called for ‘organized communities that can

participate in devolved authority structures and keep local governments accountable’ (Narayan et al.,

2000: 283; see also Figures 10.1 and 10.2).

In due course, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) for 2000/01 advocated

‘empowerment’ of poor communities, including through participation in public services, and making

public agencies directly accountable to the public via the media, the courts and advocacy by civil society

organizations. It departed abruptly from the public administration doctrine of accountability with the

assertion that ‘the quality of public service is reduced when public officials are held accountable more to

their hierarchical superiors than to the people they serve.'

The new doctrine was amplified by WDR 2004. The argument now was that elections are an inadequate

way for citizens to control what state agencies do in their name: ‘Given the weaknesses in the ‘long

route’ of accountability (i.e. classic vertical accountability), service outcomes can be improved by

12 Or, more correctly, a revived fashion: see below.

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strengthening the ‘short route’ - by increasing the client’s power over providers.’ In making this

argument, World Bank authors were mindful of innovations in developing countries where officials’

direct accountability to their clients has been institutionalized. The Indian experience with citizen report

cards and the Brazilian experiment in participatory budgeting, both celebrated in WDR 2004, are

innovations which illustrate both the strength and one or two weaknesses of the new accountability

doctrine.

7.2 Citizen report cards in Bengaluru

A ‘citizen report card’ survey in Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka state in 1993 identified an abysmal

satisfaction rating of 9% with municipal services. Following press coverage and action by the state

government, satisfaction increased across two subsequent surveys to 48% in 2003. The World Bank

evaluated the initiative positively (Ravindra, 2004), and the evidence that ‘voice’ was improving services,

just as the new doctrine had said it would, stimulated replications in countries as far apart as Ethiopia,

the Philippines and the Ukraine

However, the survey instigator, Samuel Paul, was more cautious than his admirers. He concedes that

service quality started to improve in the context of a wider urban reform programme introduced by the

Congress party state government which came to power in 1999. In fact the programme was wound up in

2004 by an incoming state Chief Minister who believed that its urban bias had lost the Congress party

votes. The Report Card initiative was not repeated after the 2004 election in Karnataka. Paul’s initiative

suffered from the perception that it served a sectional (urban) interest.13 It was certainly providing direct

accountability to citizens. But the accountability was only to one group of citizens, urban dwellers, and

was perceived to be at the expense of rural dwellers (Paul, undated).

7.3 Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre

The participatory budgeting experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil draws on a strong history of social

movements, and on the neighborhood associations and other participatory procedures introduced when

the Workers’ Party took control of the municipality in 1991. By 2000, at least 20,000 residents were

13 It is perhaps relevant to note that the author of the evaluation study which conferred the World Bank seal of approval

was not a disinterested party, being a former Chief Secretary of the Karnataka state government who subsequently

joined the Board of the Public Affairs Centre, the NGO in Bengaluru which sponsored the initiative.

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taking part in the participatory processes, which covered the full range of municipal budgets from road-

building to health care. Review meetings in municipal districts took place at least twice a month,

attended by around 50 people on average. However, Porto Alegre’s budget experiment has accounted

for only a modest proportion of the municipal budget: officials still hold most of the purse-strings. There

have been problems elsewhere too: an optimistic report of an attempted replication of Porto Alegre in El

Salvador admits that participatory budgeting had fallen into disuse in 60% of the locations where it had

been attempted; and emerging evidence from Africa is also disappointing (Bland, 2011; Booth, 2011;

Gaventa and McGee, 2010). Moreover, ‘If one considers the legislature to be an important organ of

democratic institutionality, it may seem problematic that the local legislature tends to have its powers

diminished by the participatory budget planning’ (Teivanien, 2002: 629; see also Baiocchi, 2003).

7.4 The appropropriateness of bottom-up reforms

The difficulties with accountability that bottom-up initiatives inadvertently create (‘unintended

consequences’ again!) echo criticisms which we have mostly forgotten in development circles that

followed the wave of participation experiments in countries like Libya, Tanzania and Yugoslavia in the

1960s and 1970s, not to mention industrialized countries like the UK and the US (Pagano and Rowthorn,

1996; Richardson, 1983; Wolfe, 1970).

Finally, it is important to draw a distinction here between public administration functions. The ‘voice’

approach is most promising for functions such as service provision, regulation and revenue collection

where there is a clear interface with citizens, and therefore a citizen constituency for reform. However, it

is less promising for overall policy formulation and ‘back office’ functions such as human resource

management which are less visible to citizens. Kessy and McCourt (2010) found that school meetings in

Tanzania were better attended than any other participatory forum: citizens care a great deal more

a b o u t t h e i r children's education than about abstruse questions of governance. (This may be why one

UK party leader was mocked in the 1997 general election when he put the creation of an independent

central bank at the center of his party’s programme. His technocratic proposal duly failed to galvanize

voters.) For the back-office functions, top-down management reform is probably the only way to

proceed.

So there are questions of appropriateness with the bottom-up reforms, just as there have been with the

top-down ones. It is ironic that advocates of bottom-up approaches to reform have been slower than

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their top-down counterparts to recognize the problems we have just discussed, even though their

favoured initiatives have been concentrated in middle-income countries, especially in Latin America, and

implemented in idiosyncratic ways.

That indifference to context, mixed with the powerful support of international development agencies,

has prompted a concern in an article which is sympathetic to the reforms that the voice-based reforms

might be ‘ground, pasteurized and converted into new appendages of conditionality’. Santos (1998: 507)

was prescient: ‘process conditionality’ in the form of a requirement for governments to consult public

society was to become integral to the design of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the lending

vehicle that replaced structural adjustment loans, with initiatives like Porto Alegre and Bengaluru held up

as models. Despite criticisms that what was being promoted was not so much ownership as ‘donorship’

(Cramer et al., 2006; Dijkstra, 2002), the model has spread to other development agencies like DFID and

UNDP.

8. Cognitively complex problem-solving: the case of Myanmar

Myanmar in the period between the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi in November 2010 and

the general election in late 2014 offers an example of this approach in operation. The government in that

historical parenthesis wanted to make up for lost time by showing its citizens, belatedly, that it wanted to

respond to their concerns. It requested advice from a development agency on how it should use the

machinery of government to that end. A briefing paper was prepared, and discussed with ministers in the

Office of the President in early 2013. It included the following text and table as a summary.

Reforms should:

 be tailored to the institutional and cultural context

 address specific problems which policymakers have identified

 have strong leadership commitment

Table 2 'Cognitively complex' policy problem-solving in Myanmar

APPROACH FEATURES EXAMPLES ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES

LONG-TERM Commissions and strategies

Commissions: A broad view of government roles

Korea South Africa Lao PDR

Fundamental reorientation of administrative

Cannot address immediate problems; Governments may 'bite

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and functions Strategies: strategic analysis; focus on specific issues; implementation timetable

Malaysia Vietnam

structure; Generating national consensus for reform ; Durable blueprint for reform

off more than they can chew'; Recommendations may be out of date by the time the report appears

Strengthening merit

Institutions and professional methods to ensure fairness and 'the best person for the job'

Sri Lanka UK

Strong institutions protect against patronage; Better selection and promotion improves service performance

Rigid institutions create bureaucratic inflexibility; Advanced methods are expensive and require high capacity

SHORT-TERM Public service guarantees and 'deliverology'

Public Service Guarantee Acts Special-purpose central units setting targets for rapid service improvements

India Indonesia Malaysia

Popular ‘one-stop’ initiative Sharp focus on key priorities; Can achieve quick results; Hard evidence of results

Effectiveness is unclear Requires strong central authority and high capacity to communicate and achieve targets

Bottom-up approach

Citizens, civil society organizations and public servants participate in policy

Brazil India

Involving citizens can deepen democracy; Harnesses the support of stakeholders

May undermine democratic mandate; May limit civil servants' ability to make professional judgements

The government discarded most of the long-term options (in hindsight, it probably realized that it could

plan only for the short time remaining up to the election), apart from some actions to strengthen merit.

The major option it adopted was an idiosyncratic hybrid of deliverology and 'bottom-up', an instance of

what we called 'bricolage' earlier in the paper: having Malaysia as a near neighbour, the government was

keen to replicate its delivery unit, Pemandu. Service ministries were instructed to constitute a committee

functioning as a delivery unit (there were procedural barriers to setting up a delivery unit as a separate

structure), and use it as a vehicle for 'going to the people' to find out what they wanted and give it to

them.

The way the initiative unfolded was both as dynamic and, perhaps, as naïve as this bald outline suggests,

though it was refined following a rapid evaluation after initial implementation. It was, in any case, swept

away in the electoral tidal wave that brought the National League for Democracy to power in December

2014. No claim is made for its lasting effects.

However, the Myanmar case indicates how the approach discussed in this article might be applied. Within

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the framework of public administration in low-income Myanmar, ministers, officials and development

agency staff worked to clarify the policy problem which the government was trying to solve, and to design

a solution in the light of a rich menu of policy options. The menu included two of the reform approaches

which have been discussed in this article, namely NPM and 'bottom-up'. This is in marked contrast with

the habitual practice of at least some development agencies, which conduct their independent analysis of

a country's key problems through a country strategy exercise, and then engage with national actors to turn

it into a development programme. The starting point for the exercise was a policy problem framed by the

government, rather than the problem of how to produce a country strategy as framed by a development

agency.

9. Conclusion: from failure to success?

‘Almost none (of the many identified factors affecting commitment to economic

reform) seems to have a uniform effect across countries . . . Reform outcomes

depend on complex combinations of a variety of factors.’ (Campos and Esfahani, 2000:

222)

‘Incomplete and even quite ambiguous explanations are about the most we should

expect. This is not an area in which clear-cut, high-probability causal models can be

developed - far from it.’ (Whitehead, 1990: 1145)

‘Answers must be invented for each country individually.’ (Nelson, 1990: 361)

In the light of the confession of relative failure at the start of this paper, citing these quotations may

look like gratuitous self-flagellation. However, they take on a more positive hue when we place them in

the light of the problem-solving approach that is proposed in this paper. Seen in that perspective, the

suggestion arises that where the approaches failed, it was not necessarily because of any intrinsic

defect: they may have been responses to problems which arose in one setting, but which did not arise in

the setting to which they were being applied.

We had a vivid example of this just as this paper was completed. Under its new President, Dr Jim Kim,

the World Bank has developed an interest in a so-called ‘science of delivery’. This has led in turn to an

interest in initiatives such as Malaysia’s National Key Result Areas, because of the dramatic

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improvement in service outcomes which those initiatives have engendered. However, such initiatives

presuppose that a government has made service delivery improvement a key objective, as Malaysia’s

has done. Evidence is emerging – predictably, from the perspective taken in this paper - that where an

approach like Malaysia’s has been attempted in countries which do not share that objective in any real

sense, it has either failed or it has been adapted almost out of recognition to serve policymakers’

specific preoccupations (Gold, 2017).

This example does seem to support the argument on which this paper is based, namely that having

specified the problem we are trying to solve as precisely as we can, just as Fritz and Andrews have

enjoined, we should select our attempted solution from a broad range of alternatives, as was attempted

in the Myanmar case. In her classic study of what she calls ‘wooden-headedness’ in policymaking, The

march of folly, the American historian Barbara Tuchman (1984: 480) asserted that

‘Leaders in government, on the authority of Henry Kissinger, do not learn beyond the

convictions they bring with them; they are ‘the intellectual capital they will consume as

long as they are in office.’'

That may be so. But perhaps their advisers, who are the intended audience for this article, can

compensate for that deficiency in the ways that have been proposed here.

In this way, we hope that this review of models of public service reform and their trajectories suggests a

way forward which readers will be able to pursue. Very different from public management specialists in

industrialized countries, specialists in public management in development are frequently economists,

with a learned preference for unitary, sharp-edged solutions. Yet such solutions are even less on offer

in developing countries than they are elsewhere.

Let us make an analogy with the practice of medicine. There are medical doctors who choose to

practice in poor countries because of the challenge they offer to their professional judgment and

improvisational skills, not to mention their humanitarian commitment: German Nobel Prize winner

Albert Schweitzer is the classic example. Moreover, and very interestingly, we have seen the

development of ‘problem-based learning’ among Medical Schools, to the extent that some of those

schools have made medical problem- solving the center around which their students’ entire medical

education revolves (Barrows, 1996).

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Thus we hope that among our readers there are a few who will be stimulated rather than daunted by

the sheer intricacy of the challenges I have touched upon in this paper. Commenting on the evidence of

business start-up failure which we quoted at the start of this article, one investor remarked that

"People are embarrassed to talk about their failures, but the truth is that if you don't

have a lot of failures, then you're just not doing it right, because that means that you're

not investing in risky ventures." (Cowan, quoted in Gage, 2012)

Perhaps our refinement of the problem-based approach will help reformers to see a way forward with

tackling those challenges; and perhaps in so doing, the failure of the present writer’s generation of

reformers will be the paradoxical foundation for the success of a new generation.

first draft submitted April 2014

final draft accepted June 2017

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