|
The civil service in developing countries is an important
instrument for exercising state power to achieve development objectives.
In British and French colonies, the civil service was an avenue
to leadership for indigenous people and it provided useful experience
for those who later came to run their countries. Typically, at independence the civil service was understaffed,
inadequately trained, and poorly organized, so strengthening the public
service was and remains an important focus of development assistance.
In East Africa in the Ford Foundation in the middle 1960s,
supplying economists to economic planning departments in Kenya and
Tanzania was a key element of our program. The effort was particularly successful in Kenya, where Professor
Edgar O. Edwards led a group of advisors numbering four to eight at
different times. He did not
call them a team, because each was considered an employee of the Kenya
Government, and he did not discuss his work with the Ford Foundation
office, except to make the case for personnel changes as required. He
became trusted by the government to a remarkable degree, and his
independence from the Foundation was essential to his acceptance. When,
in subsequent years, the Foundation pulled out of the advisory business,
one of Franklin Thomas' major errors, Kenya asked the World Bank to
provide Edwards' service. The Bank agreed, but stipulated that quarterly
reports were due from all advisors as a matter of policy. Both Edwards
and the Government fought that provision, and a compromise was found in
which reports were filed quarterly but contained no information about
policy issues.
Tom Mboya was appointed the first Minister of Planning after
Kenyan independence in 1963. He
did not show up at the Ministry for work until three months after his
appointment, because he thought he was being relegated to a useless
ministry to get him, an Abaluya, out of the way of the dominant Kikuyus.
When he did appear, however, he became an adept learner of the
uses of economic policy in coordinating the efforts of the new
government. By constructing an economic five-year plan, with all
ministries participating, he was able to gain a government-wide
consensus on what the state was striving to do, and how it was going to
do it.
The Tanzania effort was, alas, less successful. The country had less than 100 university graduates at
independence, and less than 1000 high school grads. It was led by an admirable man, President Julius Nyerere, who
sadly overestimated the abilities and motivation of his countrymen in
pursuit of his socialistic dream. The
advisors the Foundation supplied were chosen by the Government itself,
and although able people, they did not have the foresight to dissuade
Nyerere from his disastrous course. (1991 Tanzania)
In the late 1970s,
as I was leaving the Foundation, I evaluated the Foundation’s work in
economic planning and management in Eastern Africa for the previous 15
years (1977 Administration). The economic planning projects generally
stood up well, but there wasn’t much to show for anything done in the
management field. I concluded that management, and public administration,
were practices with deep ties to cultural values. We had come to Africa with a new bag of tricks, not to replace
colonial administrative practices for the most part, but to strengthen
them. Neither the colonial
system nor anything new that we presented was based upon African culture
and values, especially tribal values.
One example of the conflict between personal values and the
values instilled in the civil service was a personnel evaluation scheme
that the Government of Kenya sought to implement, in order to make
employees more responsible for their work. When a Wakamba superior gave a poor rating to his Kikuyu
subordinate, or vice versa, angry denunciations sometimes came from
Parliament because of the affront caused by a member of one tribe
criticizing another. Detribalization
was a popular buzzword in those days, and most governments sought to
pretend that tribal loyalties had no place in governance, but the
reality was different.
In Lebanon, a decade later, I came to admire the ways in which
the Lebanese system recognized sub-national loyalties. Sixteen religions, Christian sects and Muslim sects, shared power
and position under a formula originating in 1923. The president was, and is, a
Maronite, the speaker of the house a
Shiite, the prime minister a Sunni, and so on. During elections, factions would put forward slates of candidates
in each district that carefully matched the religious composition of
that area. That avoided the
calamity of having a Maronite party opposing the Shiites or Sunnis; each
faction had to mirror the composition of each district. The success of this arrangement could be seen in the fact that
the elections were real and hard-fought, sometimes to the point of
bloodshed. As more
evidence, Lebanon had a free press, to such an extent that foreign
organizations, such as the ruling cliques of Iraq, Syria and Libya,
would buy newspapers in Beirut to get their views across, even though
they would not allow free expression of opinion at home. In further evidence of a functioning system, the Lebanese economy
expanded continually since the second World War.
There were many things wrong with the Lebanese system, corruption
and power brokering among others, but for an Arab state in the Middle
East it was remarkably successful economically, politically, and in
terms of respect for individual liberties. With this perception, I invited two Foundation colleagues,
political scientists David and Audrey Smock, to spend a year in Lebanon
and analyze what made the system work. By way of contrast, the Smocks compared Ghana, where Nkrumah
sought to suppress tribal loyalties, with Lebanon, where loyalty to
one’s sect was considered legitimate and natural.
The Smocks produced a very penetrating and well-documented book,
as anticipated [1]. Unfortunately,
it was published in 1975, at the heart of the Lebanese civil war, and
never received the attention it deserved. Although the Lebanese system was carefully balanced, a massive
influx of armed Palestinians fleeing from Jordan destabilized the system
and led to a terrible conflict. I
don’t say this critically of the Palestinians. They were simply a powerful force not included in the formula,
and their presence upset the carefully achieved division of power.
The Lebanese never had much of a civil service. With a free enterprise mentality that would make Pat Buchanan
blush, they despised state service. When I arrived in Beirut people sometimes bragged about slapping
a policeman’s face when he stopped them for a traffic violation. They later wished for more state authority as the city went
through a couple of years of genuine anarchy.
My predecessor as Foundation representative in the Middle East
was the late J. Donald
Kingsley, a distinguished expert on public administration. He made a
modest grant to the Lebanese government to set up a central civil
service authority and training center, but by the time I saw the
organization it had become part of the problem, not the solution. Unable to stamp out corruption or nepotism, it simply became one
more obstacle to getting anything done, a bureaucratic entity whose
permission was required for internal departmental reorganizations and
appointments.
A number of other administration projects in the region suffered
similar fates. In Jordan,
an elaborate classification and assignment system was developed with
Foundation help. It was not
implemented, however. Although
Hussein’s government was enthusiastic about the concept of modern
management, when they figured out that the system if implemented would
curtail their ability to reward loyalty, it was abandoned. The Kingdom was so poor in those days that the government had
little means of retaining power other than the careful use of the powers
of appointment.
(Much later I encountered an extreme case of the use of
appointments to ensure loyalty. In
Brunei, the richest country per capita in the world, virtually the
entire population of Malay citizens is employed by the government. In one province I visited, there were 100 employees of the
Agriculture Ministry, but only one farmer!
The civil service is used for three purposes: to accomplish the
minor tasks of government in the Sultanate, to distribute some of the
oil revenues to the citizenry, and to reward loyalty. Exclusion from the roles of the civil service is a serious
penalty indeed.)
One administration project in the Middle East was very
successful: the creation of an Institute of Administration in Saudi
Arabia for training the civil service. The Saudis, of course, paid the
bills. It was headed by Mhmd. Abl Khail, who later became a wise and
prudent Minister of Finance. I
came to admire a number of Saudis who, like Abl Khail, came from humble
origins, and had mediocre educations (in his case an MA in public
administration from Cairo University), but when shouldered with heavy
responsibilities met the challenge competently. Abl Khail was minister during the oil price crisis of the 1970s,
when the Shah of Iran favored raising the price of crude as high as the
market would bear. The
Saudis, with their huge reserves, kept that from happening. The intense pressures Abl Khail and others like him endured
during those days must have provided a severe challenge, to which,
fortunately for all of us, he responded superbly.
The skepticism I acquired in the Middle East about public
administration served me well later in Southeast Asia. I went to Indonesia for HIID in 1985 to help the Ministry of
Planning (BAPPENAS) set up a program for selecting and preparing
candidates for graduate training in the US, mostly in economic and
financial fields. The
project proceeded well and when I left after a year I had established
close relations with the able Secretary General of BAPPENAS, Saadillah
Mursjid. Mursjid was a very
good administrator whose horizons had been broadened by spending a year
at Harvard as a Mason Fellow.
Shortly after I left Indonesia, Mursjid was appointed Minister of
the Cabinet, in effect manager of the President’s office (SETNEG). He found SETNEG to be in something of an administrative
muddle and he called upon me to help him think through what to do about
it. The immediate task for
me was to serve on a committee of officers from SETNEG and the Institute
of Public Administration (LAN), to conduct a job analysis of SETNEG
positions. I told Mursjid that I didn’t think much of job analysis,
but he said to come anyway and make things happen.
The idea behind job analysis is quite sensible. When independent governments are first organized, after shedding
colonial rule, the ministries and agencies are generally created around
strong individuals who hire staff to do work of the ministry. Sometimes these are cronies, sometimes friends of friends, and
sometimes people with the qualifications and experience to do the job
properly. In virtually all
cases, loyalty to the minister is expected on a personal basis. Job analysis is an attempt to identify the qualifications
required for each position and the adequacy or need for training of the
incumbents. Job
descriptions are then prepared in which responsibilities are delineated
and appropriate education and experience for the positions defined. Done properly, this process lets employees know what is expected
of them, and creates parity of pay between jobs in different agencies,
paving the way for inter-agency transfers.
Indonesia was not freshly independent, and administrative reforms
were a recurrent effort. The
traditional culture of the Javanese lends charm to encounters with them;
they are invariably smiling and agreeable when met in official or social
situations. Their real feelings are not readily discerned, however, and
many a Westerner has walked away from a meeting thinking it went very
well, only to find out later that nothing had actually been agreed. Clifford
Geertz, an anthropologist who made his reputation in
Indonesia, told the story of a politician in Central Java who ran on the
platform that the voters would never know from what he said or did what
he really believed [2]. I
think he won in a landslide.
In organizational terms, Wittfogel’s hydraulic society comes to
mind. Javanese tend want to
be a part of the hierarchy, even if their pay and benefits don’t
amount to much. They have a
respect for superiors that appears to the Western eye as overly
submissive. When asked what their job is, most people respond that they
do whatever the bapak (boss or father) wants them to do. The contrast between Javanese values and those of the Chinese
citizens of the country could not be more vivid. The Chinese are more interested in achievement, mainly in
making money, and less interested in status than the Javanese. The resultant disparity of wealth between the two ethnic groups
is of course the source of great tensions, which periodically erupt in
violence.
The agency responsible for
organizational matters mandated that any department wishing to change
its configuration would first have to go through job analysis of all
positions before approval would be given. SETNEG was therefore complying with regulations, but Mursjid
still hoped that improvements in staff organization and efficiency would
ensue.
The first question I asked was whether the jobs being performed
were the jobs the various departments would need to do in the future. There seemed to be little point in pouring concrete over jobs
for which there would be no demand. Mursjid arranged for me to meet all the section heads in the
Secretariat to get their views on the matter. Some were initially reluctant to discuss the Secretariat’s
business with a foreigner, but in the end a fairly clear picture emerged.
None of the
section heads thought they were doing what they should be doing right
then, much less in the future, and virtually none of the departments had
regular output, such as reports or statistics. They had never been asked
their opinions before, and as obedient Javanese, nearly all from central
Java, they were hesitant to put suggestions forward to superiors.
Mursjid decided to pursue two courses of action: first to
designate a committee of senior officers to consider departmental
reorganizations, and second to begin upgrading staff to enable them to
handle new tasks. I focused on the second of these. Beginning with the notion that modern management is in large
measure communications, we decided to emphasize the ability to
communicate in writing, in both English and Bahasa Indonesia (the
Indonesian language), using electronic means. English speaking and writing is especially important to the staff
of SETNEG because virtually all international communications, even those
with neighboring countries, are conducted in English.
A group of 20 junior officers with
some English-speaking ability was selected to take afternoon classes
five days a week. Three of
those days were devoted to English-language writing: letters, memos, and
reports. The group was
taught by Kay Ikranagara, an American PhD in linguistics married to an
Indonesian. The other two
afternoons were devoted to computer instruction.
As a reward for successful completion of the four-month course,
an opportunity to visit Australia was arranged through that country’s
assistance program. The
group was based at the Australian National University, where they were
coached in report-writing, and they had access to the Office of the
Prime Minister and Cabinet. There
they observed the way the Australians handled matters similar to those
they were individually responsible for in SETNEG, and wrote analyses of
which procedures might be adapted to Indonesian needs, and which should
not.
The results were spectacular. They were transformed from a group of forelock-tugging confirmed
subordinates who did only what the bapak told them into an energetic
bunch of men and women with ideas of their own and no hesitancy in
expressing them. Mursjid
was delighted, and Indonesians don’t delight easily. Even after the program was over, the group continued to meet and
to discuss administrative problems. Some even succeeded in getting small research grants from the
Australians to support their after-hours studies.
Kay also organized a course in Bahasa Indonesia to teach writing.
Here she faced enormous difficulties, symptomatic of the
development task in a country with a strong traditional culture, such as
Indonesia. The civil
service was an oral culture, not a written one. In British colonies, civil servants were drilled in the
importance of the paper trail and a successful career generally entailed
the ability to write a terse minute to the file after any meeting. Not so in former Dutch
colonies. The Dutch did not encourage indigenous administrators, and
stinted on education and training.
Writing
is important to administration for a number of reasons, not least is to
keep straight the record of what actually happened. It requires the statement of a position, whereas the Javanese
style is to be elliptic and to leave plenty of room for later changes of
mind. Written
communications also invite analysis and detailed response. They are not time-dependent; the responder need not have been
present when the statement was made or written.
There was no standard literature or teaching materials dealing
with business or government writing in the Indonesian language. Scholars at the language academy specialized in words or
sentences, but paragraphs were generally too complex and no one had yet
taken on the memo. Senior
officers complained that memos about a subject went all around it and
presented every aspect but arrived at no conclusion. This in fact is rooted in the
culture. An Indonesian subordinate, even in the President’s office,
could not bring himself to made a direct recommendation to a superior. This was thought to be impertinent and arrogant, even when the
superiors were genuinely seeking help in decision-making. It was possible for them to write recommendations in English,
strangely enough, but, as Kay found, exceedingly difficult to get
students to do so in Bahasa Indonesia.
From this experience I took several lessons. One is that a traditional culture often keeps people in defined
roles even when their superiors want them to take more initiative. Secondly, it can be easier to break the rigidity of habit and
custom by working in a foreign language, especially using modern
technology. Being able to
employ computer technology is a source of pride in developing countries
as well as elsewhere, and the opportunity to learn is a considerable
incentive. Third,
once these young officers got the message, they blossomed more quickly
than I thought possible. This
was immensely encouraging to Mursjid because the transformation was
dramatic, and occurred in a relatively short time with fairly modest
costs.
Mursjid presented President Suharto with an extensive report on
the organizational plans and training of SETNEG and had plans to extend
such training to other parts of the extensive civil service of the
country. Since Suharto’s overthrow, however, he has had no role in
government.
Around this time, the early 1990’s, I began undertaking
occasional consulting assignments for the Management Development Program
(MDP) of the UNDP. The MDP
was an imaginative response by the UNDP to the perception that although
civil service effectiveness was low in most developing countries, none
of the specialized agencies, such as UNESCO, WHO, FAO, and ILO, had a
mandate directed to the problem. The MDP, described in more detail in “1997
UNDP/ MDP,” was modest in
size, set up outside regular country budgets so the countries could call
upon it without disturbing their sectoral projects. MDP was primarily a diagnostic service, through which groups of
consultants could visit a country briefly to identify problems with the
public service that could be addressed by projects the consultants would
help to define. The MDP
itself would seldom have funds with which to execute the projects, but
the country could then decide to use part of its UNDP allocation, or
turn to other donors for financial support.
The first country I visited was Iraq. It was fascinating. The
ministers all wore military uniforms and most of the civil servants we
met were terrified of saying anything that might be construed as
critical of the regime. Our
report (Iraq) suggested that the authoritarian leadership style that
gained them victory in the recently completed war with Iran was not
particularly conducive to peacetime governance. We proposed a training program costing well in excess of the
funds available through MDP, but suggested that Iraq might turn to
Kuwait for additional financing. Sometimes
I think they misinterpreted those suggestions, as Iraq invaded Kuwait
shortly thereafter.
I later undertook MDP visits to Oman, Sharjah, and Egypt, in the
Arab world, and to Uzbekistan and Ukraine in the states of the former
Soviet Union. I won’t go
into detail about these visits, but the reports that ensued are
available (UNDP Reports). Some
generalizations about the types of problems I found in these two
settings may be useful.
Civil service problems are
typically quite different in developing countries from the states of the
former Soviet Union. In the
former, ministries tend to be regarded almost as personal fiefdoms of
the minister. Staff loyalty
is expected to be to the person rather than to the organization. Sometimes, employees of one ministry are discouraged from
even talking to employees of other ministries, which may be headed by
rivals or enemies of the home ministry. Organizational boundaries in such situations are very thick, and
it is difficult for one ministry to get services from others.
Egypt gave one example of this boundary problem. It was so difficult for a ministry or agency to get reliable
assistance from the ministries nominally responsible for them, such as
telephones, electricity, roads, etc., that the most successful
government agencies, the army and the Suez Canal Authority, simply set
themselves up to supply their own services as needed. This allowed these agencies, both high-priority bodies for the
government, to operate independently and relatively efficiently.
Traditional approaches to public administration concentrate on
establishing civil service commissions, encouraging inter-agency
transfers, and seeking parity for employees among agencies and
ministries through job classification exercises. I have no quarrel with any of these measures, but often they are
not timely or not effective.
I prefer to seek ways to compel
interagency communication at many levels, to encourage cooperation among
them. Multi-agency training
courses are another way to get middle-level personnel acquainted with
each other. The budget
process is typically used to keep agencies in line, but it tends to be a
control mechanism rather than one stimulating interagency cooperation. The planning process can help, but it is usually a periodic
activity rather than a continuing one.
In Indonesia, it seemed to me that cooperation could be fostered
through the information system. To
be effective, regular reports need to circulate through all ministries
and agencies that can use the information. Information is considered by many to be a form of power, to be
hoarded rather than shared, so information flows would need to be
centrally defined. The use of computers is central to the process, not only for
ease of communication, but because the allure of modern technology makes
their use attractive to junior staff. Of course, it is necessary not only to train middle-level people
in report-writing and computer use; senior officials must be brought on
board as well. They need to
see the utility of regular reporting (quantified where possible) from
their departments, if they are going to require the production of
reports. Senior staff
seminars with demonstrations can help leaders become aware of the
possibilities.
In the former Soviet Union, the situation is quite different. Government employees are relatively well educated, they know it,
and they resent having to take advice from the West. But they are completely inexperienced in two vital areas:
policy-making and market economics. Under the Soviet Union, policies were not made in the provinces;
they were made in Moscow and executed in the provinces. Here they were, independent countries claiming to believe in
private enterprise, with no notion of market regulation, taxation
alternatives, incentive systems, state revenue generation, etc. And they were not going to have some foreigner in their
policymaking bodies trying to tell them what to do.
In Uzbekistan, I proposed that an institute be set up for policy
research in the former senior party training school. The institute would be responsible to the Prime Minister’s
office. Senior government
analysts and academics from the universities would carry out research on
selected issues. A
qualified Western economist would be available as a resource person to
help structure research projects and supply reference materials from
abroad. These might be
texts on economic policy or descriptions of institutional arrangements
that helped solve similar problems abroad. A backstopping agency able to supply the needed reference
materials and service the project’s needs would be based, probably in
a university, in Western Europe or the United States. The government was quite pleased with this idea, and it has I
believe been implemented.
In Ukraine, a quasi-governmental research institute was already
underway, with external support from George Soros. They needed a plan for the development of the institute, which
Sandro Sideri, of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and I
helped them to draw up (Ukraine). The
problems and sensitivities I found in Ukraine were remarkably similar to
those in Uzbekistan.
Conclusions
In Indonesia, the human development and technology elements in my
experience began to come together with organizational development
experience into something approaching coherence. Learning to write operational memos and reports in English, in
which one’s own thinking had to be exposed, turned out to be a
powerful arena for human development, or at least for the realization of
human potential in the participants. The organization, SETNEG, was able to give more autonomy and
initiative to those completing the course than would normally be the
case in the Indonesian hierarchy.
This was the only case in my experience where a conscious effort
was made to raise the consciousness of members of an organization to a
higher level. It made me
think that there must be many opportunities where training and
technology could be employed explicitly for human developmental purposes.
Moreover, there
must be many examples of successful human development resulting from
activities that have other stated objectives. At Fielding, I tried with varying degrees of success to relate
the human development perspective to other issues, such as globalization
(Progress and Global
Politics), management,
religion, education (Book Review:
Applied Human Development Theory), development strategy, etc.
I quickly came to the conclusion
that the subject is too big for mine to be a solitary quest. I need help, and that is why I began building this web
site. If I can generate a process of lively interaction among people
interested in one or another aspect of this site, it could become a
vehicle for a new type of knowledge creation, a melding of minds not
formally linked in any way but electronically. Mao once used the slogan “Let one hundred flowers bloom.”
It was an inspiring concept, but when they bloomed he pulled them
out by the roots. That
won’t happen here.
So I am inviting response; even, or perhaps especially, critical
response. My email address
is feedback@developmentstrategies.org.
I hope to hear from you.
References
1.
Smock, D. R. and A. C. Smock, The
Politics of Pluralism: A comparative study of Lebanon and Ghana.
1975, New York: Elsevier. 369.
2.
Geertz, C., Old Societies
and New States: The quest for modernity in Asia. 1963, New York:
Glencoe.
|
