Civil service reforms implemented over the past 35 years in many countries around the world have relaxed traditional merit system rules, decentralized the personnel function, and augmented agency and managerial discretion. One objective of these reforms has been to boost government productivity and increase the efficiency of core personnel management functions such as hiring and firing employees, but much of the available evidence suggests that reforms commonly implemented may serve political or ideological objectives better than performance-related goals. We argue for a fuller appreciation of the political motivations for reforms and a broader understanding of their implications.
Examines several questions with regard to the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reform in core civil services throughout the developing world: (1) whether developing countries are applying NPM reforms; (2) the motivations behind the application of NPM reform; (3) the extent to which reform measures are actually implemented; & (4) whether some reforms are unrelated or counter to NPM practices. Research reveals both successes & failures in NPM implementation, but this is also true of traditional public administration reforms through decentralization, capacity-building, & anticorruption measures. The author concludes that local contingencies, both administrative & political, determine the success of reform measures & that effective central institutions play a crucial role. Since the evidence for NPM effectiveness is yet uncertain, more time is needed before critical judgment is applied. Economy, efficiency, & effectiveness in public management reform must also be accompanied with experimentation & eclecticism. 80 References. L. A. Hoffman
A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ; Context: Despite a long history of reforms, Pakistan's public sector (PS) is still considered cumbersome, corrupt, and inefficient by its citizens, government and international development community. Recent reforms were operationalised in 2001 under a new economic policy called the Poverty Reduction Programme (PRP) designed to facilitate the New Public Management (NPM) influenced transformation. The overarching objectives of these reforms were to strengthen the market and public sector simultaneously and so that they complemented each other. The PS reform actions taken under this strategy were mainly based on the World Bank's (WB) experience of developing countries which identified the state's weak institutional capacity as bottleneck to this transformation. Therefore, with the view to removing these impediments, actions to train the public servants, improve their salaries, and enhanced the use of information technology (IT) were included. However, many recent reports and indicators confirm the situation in Pakistan has remained unchanged. Various generic explanations of these compromised results have been provided; however, the concrete reasons in a Pakistani setting are still unknown. Research Questions: This study aims to investigate the reasons why Pakistan's PS organisations appear to be resistant to reform and why the repeated attempts at reform appear to have had so little impact. It addresses the following questions: What effects, if any, have NPM-inspired reform attempts had on the way that public sector organisations function? What have been the intended and unintended consequences of reform attempts? Research approach: This case study aims to bridge this gap through analysing the effects of administrative reforms in the federal tax agency where these actions have been revived as a part of the comprehensive reform programme. This study is qualitative and adopts a social constructionist approach. This case study is ethnographically oriented and works within pragmatist criteria of truth and validity; the case study organisation has been conceptualised as negotiated order (Strauss, 1978); and the initiatives of training, salaries and information technology are understood as managerial attempts to reshape organisational structures, processes, and the employment relationship with employees in line with the requirements of NPM. This research mainly depends on the interpretation and analysis of data gathered through 22 semi-structured interviews, participant observation and documentary sources of information including public and classified reports from donors and government repositories as well as published scholarly articles. The data were analysed in two stages: 1. abstract analysis took place during data collection, arranging, cleaning, and extraction of themes and patterns; and 2. firm analysis happened through an iterative process of comparing these themes, patterns, and field notes to make the sense of data. Findings: The findings suggest that the desired results of efficiency, transparency, fairness, and controlling corruption could not be achieved due to the takeover of prevalent contextual corrupt practices of nepotism, favouritism and recommendation at the time of its implementation. Moreover, this content-focused approach has also ignored the context and processes that led to compromised results. I have supported these findings through the identification of these contextual problems at the organisational and national levels. Contribution: This research contributed to a greater understanding of the initiation and implementation processes of the NPM-inspired PSR in Pakistan through the identification of factors limiting its results at organisational and national levels. In turn, it helped to highlight the problems behind reformer's taken for granted assumptions of quick-fixing the institutions through rapid dosage of reform. The results will also be valuable to reformers as they will not only help reformers to understand the reasons affecting its intended results but also help them to include these in the list of safeguard.
There are very few countries of the world that are satisfied with their public bureaucracies and civil service systems. Civil service reform is being discussed in Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America [Ingraham (1996)].1 There are some that are trying to develop a career civil service and others that are fixing the problems of having a career civil service. There are some that are dealing with legacies of past colonial civil service systems while others that are struggling with identifying the role of civil service in a changing political environment. Whatever the case may be, civil service reforms are a topic of interest around the world. Each nation of the world is faced with the challenge of adjusting its domestic and international policies rather rapidly in response to forces of globalisation and technological change [Skogstad (2000) and Farazmand (1999)].2,3 The role of the civil service in economic development, governance, and public service is vital irrespective of the institutional and structural differences across countries. It is not surprising to see in the table below the number of civil service reform programmes funded by the World Bank in different parts of the world. The number of such programmes has significantly increased from 1980 to 2001.
Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a documentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform, exploring their promotion of modes of digital governance and their mobilisation of new software technologies as models for new kinds of governing practices. These intermediary organisations are generating a model of knowing public services that operates through collecting and analysing big data, consisting of personal information and behavioural data on individual service users, in order to co-produce personalised services. Their objective is a new style of political governance based on human–computer interaction and machine learning techniques in which citizens are to be governed as co-producers of personalised services interacting with the algorithms of database software.
__Abstract__ The balance between trust and distrust is shifting – yet again. The move towards public sector reforms inspired by the New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s on introduced a series of innovations based on mutual distrust between public sector actors. More recently, the concept of trust has gone through a veritable renaissance, and is now regarded as an essential feature of any kind of collaboration. At the same time, public distrust towards government and public administration has remained solidly on the agenda. In this chapter, we discuss the role of trust in the public sector. We first focus on the promise of public sector reforms to restore citizen trust through improving services and through aligning public services with citizen demands. We then further explore the basic premise of this promise, namely that citizens distrust public services and public administration, by providing comparative data on public trust. In the subsequent two sections, we introduce readers to the roles of trust and distrust in the public sector and in the relation between citizens and government, before moving on to contrasting citizen trust in public officials to public officials' trust in citizens. The penultimate section shows how trust has recently re-emerged as a key concept in public administration practice and scholarship, facilitating interaction and reducing the cost of transactions. We end with a short summary.
THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES CHANGES AND REFORM IN THE MALAYSIAN CIVIL SERVICE THAT ARE ON-GOING PROCESSES. REFORM EFFORTS ARE GROUPED INTO TWO PHASES: THE PERIOD OF RAPID ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE 1960S AND 1970S WHICH REQUIRED DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTION BUILDING, AND THE PERIOD FROM 1985 TO THE PRESENT. THE ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM EXPERIENCES ARE UNIQUELY MALAYSIAN EFFORTS TO RESPOND TO THE MALAYSIAN SOCIO-POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT AND NEEDS.
