Administrative Reform

BLUE TEAM

“Administrative reform means an induced, permanent

improvement in administration” (Wallis 1989, 170)
Part I: Golden Oldies
 Miewald: Life and Hard Times of Bureaucracies

Organizations aren’t instrumental – i.e., they ‘are not

supposed to accomplish anything beyond their own
existence’ (100)
Problem with way organizational theory sees
organizations (rational)
In reality, can look at them as technical, human relations
and political problems
 Technical
 Personal: ‘can bend an organization out of shape’ (105)
 Political: most important; key is budgeting (‘clash of values and the
making of allocative decisions’ [107])
Stages of the bureau
 Birth, growth (survival), maturity (little search); death
 Miewald: Responsibility

Difficult to get a grasp of. What is it?

 Responsiveness, flexibility, consistency, stability, leadership, probity,
candor, competence, efficacy, prudence, due process, accountability
(237)
‘Sins’ of bureaucracies
 Arrogance, political involvement, corruption, unethical behavior,
inefficiency, failure to respect legislative intent, ignoring procedures,
information manipulation, abuse of subordinates, failure to show
initiative
Concrete ways to prevent/remedy irresponsibility
 Administrative law (discretion vs Rechtsstaat); ombudsman (the
public’s ‘agent’); individual responsibility (human values and self-
regulation of bureaucrats; encouragement of whistle blowers)
 Marini: The Minnowbrook Perspective

In light of ‘new public administration’

Make PA relevant to societal problems of the day
Moving away from value-free (positivist) research
approaches
Focus on what schools/education of PA should look
like
 More comparative, empirical, focused on social equity
 Teach PA as the applied social science
 PA as ‘educational’ versus merely ‘training’
 Curriculum: ‘up to date, alive, problem oriented, and relevant’
(361)
 Policy, Implementation and Local Institutions in
Botswana (Picard and Morgan 1985)

• Focus of this chapter

– the relationship between rural development goals and central-local institutional
arrangements
• “Governments has many good ideas but we don’t know too much about
them out here” (125)
• In an interview with one administrative secretary to the district Land Board in
Botswana
• Challenges of local officials
– Implementation decisions taken far away in the national capital
– Little knowledge of the reasoning behind the policy
– Few resources, financial and administrative to carry out the policy
• Agenda and the reality: Tribal Grazing Land Policy (1975)
– Original policy: generating responsibility for the control of land use/writing a
land use plan for the district/supervising the division of district land/protecting
the interests of the poorer people
– Reality and implementation: the land boards understaffed/ill-equipped/ without
adequate office space
 Policy, Implementation and Local Institutions in
Botswana (continued)

 Why?
 Dynamics of policy implementation
 Multi-dimensional policies and institutions
 Interplay between policy and institutions/reciprocal effects
 Framework for analysis
 The degree of asymmetry between the public policy goals and the
organizational capacity of local institutions
 Policy implementation as the main consideration within the “policy context”
 Local government: Devolution and retreat
 The evolution of district councils, 1966-1970
 Faith in the center, 1970-1976
 Stalled attempts at local government perform, 1977-present
 Organizational capacity at the local level
 Central government, unwilling to increase the capacity of local government
 The affective dimension of local government
 The Mouse that Roared: Taiwan’s Management of
Trade Relations with the United States (Chan 1987)

 Main focus:
 How dependent country like Taiwan has faced conditions
of basic asymmetry in international relations?
 How we can understand the trade relationship and
predict the future?
 How small and dependent economies have tried to lessen
or evade the full impact of U.S. protectionist pressures?
 The Mouse that Roared: Taiwan’s Management of Trade
Relations with the United States (Continued)

 Micro level of bargaining tactics

 Problem redefinition, damage limitation, exploring loopholes,
linkage politics and transnational coalitions
 Macro level factors
 Taiwan’s policy capacity and U.S. accommodating behavior
 Taiwan’s institutional capabilities especially in terms of the
autonomy and strength of the state; its historical niche in U.S.
domestic policies and Washington’s cold war containment
policy
 Metagame: Taiwan’s coping behavior in the trade can be
understood in the broader context of a “metagame” that seeks
to preserve the vital political and security contributions from
the U.S.
Part II: Literary Maps and
Synthesis
 Preview

The meaning of public sector reform

Literary maps - how we have conceptualized the field
How bureaucracy provides services
 Privatization
Role of personnel
 Human resource management
 Accountability
Implementation
 Governance
 Accountability
 Corruption
Development
 The meaning of public sector reform

 “Induced, permanent improvement in administration”

(Wallis 1989, 170)
 Administrative reform strategies (Turner and Humle 1997)
 Restructuring
 Participation
 Human resources issuesAccountability Public – private mixes
 Challenges
 Management (finance/human resource/leadership)
 Measuring performance
 Accountability/responsibility for implementation
 Governance
 Human
Privatization Accountability Resource
Management

Miewald
Picard and /
Fuller/ Garrity/ Barzelay
Savas Nelson
Marini
(Minnowbrook
Arnold Perspective)
and
White Klitgaard
Morgan
Picard and
Turner Morgan
Wallis and
Hulme

Development Governance Corruption Implementation

 How bureaucracy provides services

 Privatization
 Savas: “the key to better government”
 Alarmed by growth in government

 Lays out a spectrum of privatization options from contracting out, to

franchising, to government vending
 Arnold and Morgan: projects, plans, and programs
 Need organizational framework for managers
 Distinguish between project and program management

• Project: clear objectives; defined roles and responsibilities; plans and

schedules; rewards/sanctions; feedback/adaptation mechanisms
• Program: design, implementor capacity; expanding resources/support;
collaboration with other organizations; proactive leadership
 Result: towards better effectiveness in implementation of public policy
goals
 Role of personnel

 Human resource management

 A key way to reform, over time
 Education rather than technical training (Minnowbrook)
 Accountability
 Barzelay: need to move to “post-bureaucratic” structure where officials,
civil servants “build” rather than “enforce” accountability
 Often seen in terms of accountability to overseers, line agencies and staff

 Should move from “guardianship to problem solving” (99)

 Need “new routines” and a new culture

• “way things should and could be”

• Problem-solving
• “customers and public policy”
• “producing value”
• “caring about people”
 Implementation

 Governance
 World Bank Policy and NGOs: World bank has expanded collaboration
with private agencies and grassroots groups in projects (Nelson 1995).
 NGOs tendencies to process-oriented programming contradicts the
interests of World Bank (Nelson 1995).
 Beyond the market, beyond the state (Turner and Hulme 1997, 200)
 the rise of non-governmental organizations

 Governance and creating civil society (Garrity 1996)

 Institutional development/changing organizational behavior
and management practices (Garrity 1996)
 Implementation (Continued)

 Corruption (Klitgaard 1991)

 Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC):
analyzing the ICAC’s success: several principal-agent client
relationships
 Singapore: Cleaning up corruption
 Changing rewards and penalties
 Gathering information
 Restructuring the principal-agent-client relationship
 Case of Korea: collusion in bidding/attempts to make competition
work
 Administrative reform and development

 Bureaucracy and development (Turner and Hulme 1997)

 Leading issues relating to bureaucracy and development
 Size
 Capacity: project implementation and capacity
 Culture: bureaucracies of developing countries are heavily
influenced by endogenous cultures.
 Power, politics, and authority: power distribution in
society/in government
 Bureaucratic bias
 Gender and bureaucracy
 Corruption
 Administrative reform and development
(Continued)

 Reform cases (Wallis 1989)

 China – public health program/Kenya - tea development
authority/Korea - government invested enterprises
 NGOs, empowerment and politics (Turner and Hulme 1997)
 Empowerment as a grand object
 NGOs claim to be redistributing power at the local level and
influencing policy
 People-centered development
 Referneces

 Marini, Frank. 1971. Toward a new public administration:

the Minnowbrook perspective. Scranton, PA: Chandler Pub.
Co.
 Chan, S. 1987. "The mouse that roared: Taiwan's
management of trade relations with the US." Comparative
Political Studies 20 (3):251-92.
 Picard, Louis A., and Philip E. Morgan. 1985. "Policy,
implementation and local institutions in Botswana." In The
evolution of modern Botswana, ed. L. A. Picard. London: Rex
Collings.
 Miewald, Robert D. 1978. Public administration: a critical
perspective. New York: McGraw-Hill.
 References

 Baker, Randall. 1994. Comparative public management:

putting U.S. public policy and implementation in context.
Westport, CN: Praeger.
 Barzelay, Michael, and Babak J. Armajani. 1992. Breaking
through bureaucracy: a new vision for managing in
government. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Picard, Louis A., Michele Garrity, and International Institute
of Administrative Sciences. 1994. Policy reform for
sustainable development in Africa: the institutional
imperative. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers.
 Savas, Emanuel S. 1987. Privatization: the key to better
government. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers.
 References

 Klitgaard, Robert E. 1988. Controlling corruption. Berkeley: University

of California Press.
 Wallis, Malcolm. 1989. Bureaucracy: its role in Third World
development. London: Macmillan.
 Nelson, Paul J. 1995. The World Bank and non-governmental
organizations: the limits of apolitical development. New York: St.
Martin's Press.
 White, Louise G. 1990. Implementing policy reforms in LDCs: a
strategy for designing and effecting change. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers.
 Turner, Mark, and David Hulme. 1997. Governance, administration,
and development: making the state work. West Hartford, CN:
Kumarian Press.