(gentle guitar music) - So I've been asked to talk broadly about some of the lessons coming out of the experience of the
World Bank and other donors in promoting public administration reform in developing countries over
the last number of decades, and you could say that I'm
in a pretty good position to talk about the evolution of the agenda during this period because I was there. My career, as Eric has as touched upon, and then my subsequent
consulting and research since I left the Bank, pretty
much kinda tracks the course of this body of work on
public administration reforms. I was hired into the
Bank as one of the three kind of foundational political scientists, professional political scientists to work on public administration in the mid 1980s. So yes, I'm super old,
but let's not go there, and for a host of reasons,
I ended up working on public administration
reforms, as Eric was suggesting, in every geographical
region, and in something like 70 countries, I've
kinda stopped counting, and even though, again, I did my research on Latin America and Brazil. When I came to the World Bank,
they totally deracinated me, and so in addition to
working on Latin American and the Caribbean, I worked on Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Eastern Europe after the
fall of the Soviet Union, and East Asia, where I ended my career managing the public sector reform program for that region. So I was kind of following
this zeitgeist of public sector and governance reforms around the world. I would just, you know,
say that that means that I had kind of a catbird seat you know, to the history of this field as it were, and, you know,
witnessed a lot of highs and a lotta lows in these reforms, so this is kind of a personal narrative for me that I'm gonna be
sharing with you to some extent, and I would just say that a lot of the kind of
mistakes and the errors in judgment that I'm gonna
be calling out, you know during my remarks are ones
that I personally made. So I'm just kinda putting that out there, but I hope that this
can also be understood as a narrative about how
reflective practitioners can take lessons from,
you know, our experience to try to climb up the, you know, the steep learning curve
of doing things better. and particularly in this field, where I think there's still, you know, quite a lot to be learned. Okay, so just to set
this up, I wanna clarify that even though the
topic has been advertised as public administration, you know, I will be talking broadly about public administration reforms, but that covers quite a lotta stuff. That's, you know, it could be depending on how you parse it, it
could be regulatory reform business reengineerings,
center of government reforms, local government and
decentralization, capacity building, you know, on and on and on, and so what I wanna do today is talk about the issues that I've
really been more intensively and extensively involved
in, which is a subset of public administration reform. In the World Bank, we were working on an area
called civil service reforms. So that's what I wanna
be talking about today, and, you know, broadly civil
service reform is about people. It's about how human resources
are managed in government, what systems and approaches
are used to organize and manage the people, and
in particular, what practices for hiring, for paying
them, for promoting them, for providing incentives, and disciplining you
know, this large swath of what are often referred to
as career public officials, The civil servants who work in
the executive bureaucracy and how this, management of these human
resources is directed towards making government work
as effectively as possible. So that's kind of what
the field is as it were. So I'm gonna take you know, the
next, I don't know how long, 30, 40 minutes to try to
talk about this project of civil service reform at the World Bank. What was done in the name of these kinds of programs, how they worked
out and where things might or perhaps should go in the future, and I just wanna put out
maybe a basic premise, which is that I think that
civil service reform as a field or as a sub-field, at least in the international
development sort of community and within the World Bank has been kind of an underdog agenda, it's hard to say exactly why. I mean, there are lots of reasons, but I think there's the sense
that maybe it hasn't worked out so well, if you're
an economist, I think it, I don't know how many
economists are in the room, I'll be careful not to
disparage you too much, but I think it feels to economists like as a kinda squidgy
sort of undertaking, hard to kind of get your hands around it, but it's also been a perennial
agenda that's persisted, and in fact, it's grown
in terms of the level of investment that it's received in places like the World Bank, and I guess I would argue if we look around the
world today, that indeed, even in an advanced countries
and perhaps even in this one, a capable professional
civil service is intrinsic to the success of a lot
of other policy objectives that perhaps have higher visibility on the international
development to-do list. So it's a pretty important area even if it hasn't quite
gotten the attention and the respect as it
were that it deserves. So just keeping this in mind, I think, you know, I'll be coming back to this kind of tension or this irony or paradox about civil service reform as practiced in the World
Bank and try to unbundle some of this as I go along
and take a kind of tour of the civil service horizon,
you know, in the context of bank lending and operations. I wanna do four things, and that is just to give
you a sense of the context and the background, and then
tell you something about you know, like a rough guide
to what was actually done in some of the programs
of civil service reform, and say something about their results, and then try to highlight some of the problems and constraints that have been attendant
on these kinds of programs, and then maybe hopefully throw out a few ideas about what
might be useful to consider in taking this whole field forward to the next level and to do
some of this stuff better. So I've already kind of
moved into my presentation. So let me just, try to, yeah, okay. So just to start out with a little bit of definitional clarity,
so we can all kind of agree on what we're talking about. I just wanna say that I think, it's not completely coincidental that this is a field that
keeps changing its name. So in the World Bank, I mean every time there was a reorganization, there would be different
terminology that was applied to this area of public administration, and sometimes it was
old wine in new bottles. So, you know, and you'll see
this kind of in the literature, I think, that this
terminology was morphing from public administration,
which is a kind of with respect to my
colleagues here who work deeply in the academic area of this field, I think, a quaint kind
of old-fashioned term, and when the Bank started really getting into a lot of this kind of work, it first started calling it
institutional development, which came out of a seminal pathbreaking
world development report that the Bank puts out, this kind of annual world
development report every year, and they had one in 1983 on institutional development, and it's institutions and development and institutional development, and its importance to
economic growth and so on. So that was kind of an early term. It moved then to public sector management, and then public sector reform to kind of encompass a
broader set of issues, and then at a certain point, which I'm gonna go over in a bit, it started to encompass the
whole governance field as well. So, very sort of a fluid
kind of terminology, and again, I'm gonna be talking
about this one sub-field of civil service reform,
which I've just talked about. So according to the World Bank, I mean, let me just go back here, oops, you know, this broader,
this definition I just gave about civil service reform
being about human resource management or people management, and that was certainly the case for a lot of the work that we did in the Bank. So again, these recruitment,
promotion, incentives, you know performance issues, and that
was all part of the remit, but I think in the World
Bank, a lot of what came to be defined as civil service reform was also very much
about the fiscal aspects of what was, again, in a nice,
quaint, old-fashioned way called establishment management. This is coming from the Brits. A lot of the sort of terminology came from the British influence, which was, you know,
very pervasive in the Bank, certainly when I joined, and again, I just wanna
come back to this conundrum just to set up the
discussion about this area. Civil service reform, I think, was often
considered a problem child because the projects that were used to promote this kind of
reform didn't perform as well, according to some internal criteria, which I'm gonna talk
about it in a little bit. So it was always a disappointment, but again, at the same time,
the portfolio was growing and people were beginning, over the years, to recognize
its centrality and importance, and I think there's another
sort of part of the conundrum that's useful to call
attention to, which is also, you know, there's a
chicken and egg problem because you're thinking about
improving the civil service, the core government functions. In many countries where, you know the human resource
endowment is quite weak, capacity is low broadly
in the society at large, and so the civil service
itself is affected by these same human
resource endowment deficits, and so, how does government, or how does the civil service itself become an engine for development
if, in fact, it's plagued by the same kinds of problems
that the country is at large, and so I think that's kind
of always been a struggle and a challenge, and the other thing is it's
just a very complex set of undertakings, and I
think one of the things that was often perhaps
under-understood or misunderstood was that in some ways this
complexity made it more difficult than some of the economic
reforms that were being promoted by the
World Bank and other kinds of, the other international
financial institutions, sort of certainly, in the early days. So I think that that has always caused some problems for the agenda. So, let's see. So okay, I've already told
you what I'm gonna do. Just talk about the context, the programs the results, the constraints,
and see if we can think about how this all might be
done a little bit better. So just in terms of the context, I just wanna kinda set up
a sort of periodization, if you will, about really, the evolution of international development assistance or aid to institutions broadly, and again, civil service
reform is sort of coming into the mix here. So this is kind of artificial, but I think it, again, attracts with the development of the programs that I'm gonna be talking about. This is all about what
happened after World War II when the current aid
architecture was established. 1947 was the establishment or the creation of the
Bretton Woods Institutions, so the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, you probably all know that, and I think that in the
period from World War, from the 1950s through the 1980s, what you had in terms of institutional assistance from the big development donors was taking place in the
context of a bipolar world. So, you have the two superpowers, basically, with their client states, and they weren't really rocking the boat. So they were providing individual, or support to individual organizations or agencies to make them work better. So, one example, I don't know if there are any Brazilians
in the room, but the Embrapa, there you go. - [Participant] Research corporation. - Okay, there, you know,
do you know Embrapa? Okay, well, it's a very well
regarded agricultural extension and research agency that
was kind of the darling of the donors in the '50s,
'60s, '70s, et cetera, and this is a good example
of a place where money was poured in from
USAID and the World Bank and some others to kind of
build this individual agency and Kenya Tea Development
Authority was another one that was you know, quite well regarded, and so that was sort of one form of institutional development assistance that was taking
place in this early period. Another was elite training. So, Rockefeller Foundation,
Ford Foundation, again USAID, others were
really invested in training policy elites in various countries, postgraduate training and so on, and so that's kind of the first
period, the second period, the next period was starting in the 1980s, and I would say went through the '90s, but probably went well beyond that, and this is kind of when
I came into the picture, and it was really about fiscal adjustment, and mostly providing assistance to what were then authoritarian states. So this was really coming
off a sort of overextension of states in largely in
Africa, but in some other poor areas of the world as well, and the sense of the
state was overextended, many of these governments
were in fiscal tatters, and so there had to be some
kind of adjustment taking place to bring them back under control, and a major component of
this was about the employment of lots of people in government,
in these governments, and wage bills that were
skyrocketing, at least in the view of some of the international
financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. So in terms of civil service
reform, this period saw a lot of work on rationalization of the pay and employment systems, and that meant a lot of
downsizing and adjustment of the pay regimes and
the wage bill in general, and the key here is that this
was not about an individual agency or organization. It was about a systemic approach to institutions
for the first time, and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this adjustment work in a minute, and then I think you know,
we sort of can cut off that period somewhere in the '90s, although again, it continues but I think the next kind
of big watershed event that affected the way in
which civil service reform was being carried out was the 1990s, when lots of stuff was
happening, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the Asian financial crisis that started, I think, guess '97 or so. So in terms of the collapse
of the Soviet Union, I think there was a lot, there
came to be a lot of emphasis on merit-based reform. So trying to build these sort
of Weberian civil services that were operating in
a non-politicized way, and again, I'm going to talk
about that in a moment as well. and I think the other, the other area, the other kind of, the thrust
of interventions that came to the fore during that period was coming off the Asian financial crisis when it was all of a sudden
what happened in Thailand and the corruption that might happen in South Korea was
thought to be contagious to Wall Street and the West,
and so there was this notion that good government, anti-corruption became a global public good, and I think that this coincided with the development of a
whole new way of thinking about government, which was coming out of the new public
management that was focused on making government look
like the private sector and orienting it towards a
kind of performance management approach to try to
organize it and manage it in a way that again,
mimicked the private sector. So this is kind of a
lot of what was going on during the the 1990s, a
very tumultuous period, and then that takes us,
I think, up to 2011, 2001 excuse me, 9/11/2001, and I think we're still
kind of in that phase, and that was I think the sense that global terrorism and state fragility also
kind of had reverberations and a kind of contagious
effect on countries, way beyond let's say, Somalia or
failed state Afghanistan wherever it might be, and the sense that this
sort of broader sense of governance, not just
anti-corruption, but the whole kind of state capacity and political governance, kind of issues, These were also considered
to be now a new public good. and this gave rise to a lot of the work on
institutions that was being done by places like the Bank and many others. So in terms of the civil
service reform agenda, what had been a kind of
technical narrow focus on downsizing and getting you know, employment numbers
straight and rationalizing pay and wage bills, you know, had
morphed quite significantly into a much broader
exercise that was taking into account all kinds of political and broader
institutional issues, and I think the other thing that happened during this period is that a lot of these authoritarian regimes
that had been the counterpart for places like, for the Bank and others in the '80s, particularly in Africa, had now become democratic
regimes or a lot of them. So there was a whole new aspect to the programs that
had to do with the demand for good government on the citizen's side, and so all of these programs
kind of had to open up beyond a sort of handshake
between let's say, the World Bank and the Minister of Finance to
a much broader kind of swath of the polity, and I should say as well
that this was also partly about linking the kind of
upstream human resource management stuff like paying and promoting and disciplining civil servants and figuring out how that might affect the way services were gonna be delivered on the ground to these
newly empowered citizens, and so the kind of service delivery in frontline services became much more important in this agenda. So that's a kind of very sort of rapid tour through the
last number of decades. This is an obvious point but I just wanna kind of
quickly say that we're talking about a lot of different
kinds of countries and different kinds of country clients. So civil service reform in one place doesn't necessarily look like it does in another. So again, some different
categories of countries that are reified and probably overlapping, but middle income countries
we're very interested, for example, in the performance agenda and the new public management because they were striving
to compete on a global basis, they had a human resource
endowment that was you know, at a relatively high level and this would be Asia and
parts of Latin America, and then of course, as I said these were, this is during
a period of a secular trend towards democratization
with the demand for services increasing on the part of citizens, and so, some of these new democracies, and this was all over
Latin America certainly, were really focused on
de-politicizing their civil services and increasing the meritocratic basis for
their human resource management, and then I think that kind of dovetails with the post-communist
bureaucracies that I worked in a lot in, again, in the '90s and beyond, both in Central and Eastern Europe, and these were largely
bureaucracies that had been part of the party, and suddenly now had to become more like Western civil services
and, and hire their people on the basis of their merit and skills, and their professional background, and then just finally coming back to the countries that were most active in this structural adjustment period when I joined the Bank, largely, they were in Africa,
but a lot in East Asia and South Asia as well, and a
little bit in Central America, and they were really focused on, again trying to bring their
establishments under control, their employment establishments, but also so that was the adjustment part, but also increasing their capacity, and so that also had to
do with hiring and people who were capable and
finding skills in places where they were in short supply. So that's kind of the tour
of the back, the context. So what was done in the
name of civil service reform by places like the Bank? Let me just go through a
few, again, a rough guide to what some of the programs look like. There were basically three areas. One is this pay and employment adjustment kind of, agenda that I was working on most heavily
when I came into the Bank. So, the basic thrust of these
pay and employment reforms were trying to correct what
came to be characterized as a public pay and employment syndrome, and again, lots of African countries under were experiencing this,
but you might recognize it from some other places as well. I think if you open the paper and look at recent coverage
over the last few years of Greece, you're gonna see this public pay and employment syndrome. That is countries that
had a very high wage bill in the aggregate. So out of all their
budgetary expenditures, they were spending an
enormous amount on personnel, and to some extent that was
considered to be unaffordable, but in addition or at the same time, you had this high aggregate wage bill but you had an individual
basis, very low pay. So these were civil services where people were making very little and often, they were
moonlighting in other activities or absent from their jobs because they weren't making enough to kind of make a go of it, so they weren't really being
incentivized to work very hard, and the other part of
this is that you often, I know when I first went to Ghana way back in the day, we were interviewing
the permanent secretary. It was a highest level civil
servants, civil servant in the ministerial structure for each of the ministries in Ghana, and he was making very
little more than his clerk or his driver, because so
the play was so compressed and you can imagine that
it was just very hard then to keep, to attract and retain people with, you know, good
professional backgrounds even in a place like
Ghana, which had, you know, just a very illustrious civil service back in the colonial period. It was just very hard to keep these people in place because the
incentives were so paltry. So the pay was an issue, and the other thing was that nobody really knew how many people were working in government. The establishment control
mechanisms were completely out of whack. The payroll was filled with ghost workers, and it was just very difficult to figure out who was where,
and who was getting paid what, just a very kind of opaque system, and one of the things that
accompanied this low pay syndrome was a very complex set of allowances. So in a way, what happened
was that governments tried to sort of make up
for these very low salaries. and I should say that the
low salaries were a function of the fact that they were
hiring a lot of people. So you have this big wage bill but you're hiring so many people that you're spreading
your wage bill really thin and in order to kinda try to sort of get that permanent secretary as much remuneration or as
much compensation as possible, the government would
give him a whole bunch of allowances, which were again, quite opaque and not
connected to performance and almost impossible to figure
out who was getting what. So that was kind of the basic syndrome, and so what the reforms were
about that the World Bank went in and the IMF was
involved with, was to go and get governments to
cut their staffing numbers and their aggregate wage bill, and to try to raise the pay for the people who remained and to decompress it. So again, your permanent secretary
is gonna be making enough so that he didn't go to work for the World Bank office
in Accra as a driver because he probably was gonna
make more money doing that than staying as permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture. Okay. Okay, so the other set of
reforms that were the programs that the World Bank has been working on or was, has been promoting
for quite a while, again, has to do with trying to
build merit-based practices into civil services in various
of its client countries, and this is about Max Weber and his ideas about how to, organize the bureaucracy
in a hierarchical manner, in a way that de-politicizes its functions and reduces patronage. So this is all about coming
off in lots of countries, the spoil system, that was
doling out jobs on the basis of know who instead of know how, and a lot of these reforms that the Bank was promoting financing,
helping governments organize, had to do with installing
formal transparent procedures, often, exams to get into the civil service for meritocratic hiring, for promotion, discipline, et cetera, and I think that what the
hallmark of these kinds of Weberian systems was
that all the rewards, all the incentives across
government were the same. So if you were working in one
ministry at a certain level, you'd be making the same as somebody else at the same rank in, in another ministry and you advanced mainly
on the basis of seniority, and this, I think is the case
in lots of countries still around the world, rather than
by distinguishing yourself through performance. The other characteristic or hallmark of this kind of
system is lifetime tenure. So this is a cradle-to-grave system. You come in, you know, you enter through the door as a
relatively young professional having taken an exam, and
you're there until you retire. I should just tell you that the World Bank itself
was very much modeled on this, this kind of arrangement until recently. They used to talk about
World Bank staff as lifers. You know, you could also
say that was like a prison, but that was, that's another, (audience laughing) and this is also a career model. So you you know, you come in you're,
your identity is your rank, as you go through the system,
it's not about the job you do. It's not about the function
that you're carrying out. I mean, this is again, slightly reified but that's generally the way
these things are organized. So that was kind of one set of reforms that was very much kind of pushed or promoted through
a lot of the World Bank lending over the last several decades and still is in lots of places. So that should be when we think about the
Weberian kind of merit-based civil service model, that's
really what the reforms that came to the fore in the, I mean, they were really sort of gestated and kind of being cooked
in as early as the 1970s, but I think in terms of the
Bank's own kind of activity in this area, these were
the new public management or the performance oriented or sometimes called new managerialist reforms that were really coming out of places
like New Zealand and Australia and the UK, and so on, and to some extent, in
this country as well, and these were about
kind of turning the whole Weberian merit-based civil
service model on its head, and instead of having
this kind of centralized hierarchical cradle-to
grave-bureaucracy, the idea would be to devolve human resource
management decisions down to the line level of the
manager or to the line units, and so, you know, big decentralization of kind of decision making
and you would hire and pay people on the basis, not of, of, you know, where they were in the
bureaucracy or in some uniforms, sort of single spine, you would be paying people on the basis of what they were worth in the market. So you took market
signals to determine pay, and again, this is not always
the way it was actually done but this was the theory that
I think underlay the model, and it was very much
about performance metrics. So figuring out you know, who was doing well
and paying them on the basis of their performance,
promoting them on the basis of their performance
and the whole system ran on contractual relationships
within and across government, so individual, down from the minister, down
to individual civil servants who were being held accountable or in theory, were held through
contracts for deliverables, and if they didn't deliver, their pay or their promotion path
was to be effected. So those are kind of very rough sketches of what the reforms were about. I'll just wanna say a
word about the results, and again, this is a kind of
a thumbnail version of this, but I think that the pay and
employment rationalization reforms, that again, I worked
on for many, many years. They were undertaken
largely in the beginning through these structural
adjustment programs which were on a short leash. They were very short
term kinds of programs. So the World Bank would provide, financial support to the treasury of, I'm trying to think of a
country. I can name here, to Zambia, and in return, there
would be some agreement to policy reforms that
might include downsizing or adjustment of the wage
bill or whatever it might be. and what happened in these reforms is that often after the money the money would be deposited
directly and immediately into the treasury, you know,
so that would be day one, and the program would be monitored let's say for a year or two, and almost directly
after that year passed, you'd see these you know,
employees who had been dismissed coming back through a revolving door. and so there was a sense that these were, these didn't stick. They weren't really supported
by domestic stakeholders. Again, they were often
organized on the basis of a handshake with the
Minister of Finance, and they seem not to have
a lot of staying power. I think the other thing was
that it began became clear that they had, even if they weren't,
they weren't associated directly with political upheaval. There was the sense that they
were politically infeasible, that governments were just not really, willing to take these, especially where they needed major kind of adjustment and major downsizing of the dimensions of
government or employment. They really weren't willing to do it because it was, they were
depending on support from a lot of the people who might
very well be laid off. So, with this kind of, not very successful
record, the Bank blinked and decided that you know, we're
not really gonna be pushing these reforms that are
simply not gonna stick, and so they changed, they really
sort of shifted the nature of adjustment, and introduced what they started to call programmatic adjustment lending, and the idea here was that instead of having a one or two-year
program, you might have a series of one, two, three-year
programs that would go on for many years, I mean, even decades, and that you wouldn't be asking governments to try to
attain stretch goals. So I remember one of my bosses in one of the regions I worked in just saying, whenever somebody came in and made a design, they'd
worked with government to design an adjustment program, you know, this boss would say, I don't
wanna see anything here, you know, that this government
is not willing to do or not capable of doing, so a really sort of dramatic change in the way in which structural
adjustment took place, and this very much affected the
civil service reform agenda. So that what really then
became much more prominent instead of these pay
and employment reforms, and this rationalization of
the pay and employment system. It was really much more
stepping back and saying okay, we're gonna support
incremental reforms that are really about sort of
building the technical basis for maybe one day, being
able to adjust the size and the dimensions of government, but it might be about cleaning up the mess that in this establishment control context where you didn't know
how many people there were, and so on, there were all
these ghosts and the payroll. So let's automate the payroll. Let's introduced an automated human resource management information system. Let's go out and count the
number of civil servants through a civil service
census or head count, and also I think during this
time we developed a lot of work on creating models, sort of
simulating different kinds of pay and employment scenarios, so that a government could say in five years, we wanna have X number of people at this particular pay level with these kinds of skills
working across these sectors, and this is what government
is gonna look like, and here's kind of the reform or the policy objective that we wanna set for our civil service modernization or rationalization program, and I think that's kind of what really became much more commonplace. So, I just wanted to say one, make, just one comment about the merit-based reforms that I talked about a minute ago and to say that it wasn't
just the pay and employment reforms that had a hard time
finding success in this area. It was also some of these
attempts to introduce merit-based practice
in client governments, and what happened often was
that you'd find that, you know civil service might
introduce a civil service law that established that you had
you could only hire people on the basis of an entrance exam or merit, or there would
be a very elaborate system for reviewing the
promotion of, you know civil servants, a lot of kind of formal adherence to a Weberian
merit-based system, but often what what was happening
on paper in terms of laws or the formal structures
was not really happening in reality, and the informal kind of
behaviors that had a lot to do with patronage and lots of people talk about neo-patrimonialism
in many of these countries, that was really the rule of the day. That was how people were behaving. So there was this kind of a disconnect between the formal reforms
that seem to be adopted and what was happening informally. So that was kind of the merit agenda. Well, the performance agenda
that I was talking about with the new public management
reforms and the introduction of this kind of harder
edged, performance-based management, which was mainly introduced in middle income countries, although there were a few
attempts to try it out in some of the lower capacity countries
that were pretty disastrous, but in the middle income countries, this is an agenda that was kind of supposed to follow what was happening on the public financial management side, where a lot of my colleagues
in the Bank who were working to help governments develop more sophisticated and modern
budget practices, were trying to introduce this performance-based
budgeting and a lot of these new public management
or performance-oriented reforms on the budget or the public financial management side, and so the idea was that,
well, you'd have this human resource management program that would accompany these public financial management
reforms that were going down this new public management path. That was what Malaysia,
which was famously successful in introducing some of
the new public management or performance
management-oriented reforms, and on the public financial
management side, was supposedly doing this on the civil
service side as well, but it turns out that actually it was much harder to do this kind of
reform when you're talking about managing people, and so really what almost every one of these reforms found was
that the civil service part of the new public management
agenda was hollow. Again, it might've been formal but it wasn't really followed in reality. So I think that was a
pretty disappointing set of reforms as well, and I just
wanna say though, of course, you know, for all of this,
these programs, I mean it really mattered where you were in government, so some agencies, some
organizations, of course as we all know, worked better than others. So, you know, you go into
the Ministry of Finance or the Central Bank,
and it would be humming like a, you know, humming
quite efficiently, but you go into the Ministry of Health or Education and things would be less, less efficient, and the reforms were less successful. I wanted to just point out that
there are lots of exceptions to all of this, of course, and so Vietnam was a
place where they did some really interesting reforms, which kind of surprising when you think that it's a socialist
system, but they actually introduced a lot of
merit-based reforms, a lot of performance-based reforms
in their civil service. Rwanda, you know, poor country
coming out of a holocaust, but with a pretty forceful leadership in the person of Paul
Kagame, the president, was successful in a way that
many of its neighbors weren't in introducing some of
the civil service reforms that the Bank was promoting, and then the other set of
countries where I worked a lot in the period after the collapse of the Soviet system, were these EU accession countries. These are countries trying to
get into the European Union, you know, there was a time
when people wanted to get into the European Union (audience laughing) and they were so motivated too, I mean this is, again talking
largely about central Europe but they were so motivated
that to, to be at on a par with the countries that were
sitting across the table from them in the negotiations
as they were entering the Union, that they really
drove very energetically a whole set of, of civil service reforms that I, I think persisted until now, and I think that kind of speaks very much to the carets that maybe
were there in the case of EU accession, that
perhaps were not always there in the context of international
development assistance or aid, and also I think it speaks to the demonstration effect of seeing, you know,
a Germany or a country sitting across the table with a very capable
civil service and wanting to mirror that, that kind of successful efficient government. The other thing I would
say is just speaking to my, the one Brazilian in the room just is that Brazil was
another place that at least at the sub-national
level, at the state level was doing a lot of really
interesting reforms. A lot of which were supported by the World Bank on
the performance agenda in places where you might
not have, have predicted it. and at a time when perhaps
the federal government in Brazil was not as energetic
on that kind of agenda. I wanted to point out that there hasn't actually been
a very systematic evaluation of these reforms for almost a decade. So the last one that the
Bank undertook was to look at all the public sector reforms in 2008 that the Bank was supporting, and they found that the civil service, civil service reform
investment projects, I mean, they're investment projects where you're sort of just lending money to government to do specific things. and then they're, again, these adjustment programs
where you're giving them money in exchange for their agreement to carry out policy reforms, but none
of those rated very well. They actually were all, they
all got ratings that were well below the World Bank average. So kind of an interior way of looking at it, but that
was a concern to, you know to people running the Bank,
that these projects were dogs. So they weren't too happy with this, and then the other thing was also kind of an internal criterion which is that the Bank had,
it still has a set of ratings that they use on a whole range of issues, I mean, this
go across all sectors but they in particular have a number of dimensions that look at
the way in which institutions are functioning or public
institutions are functioning in a given country. They were called the Country Performance Institutional Assessment, and it used to be back in
the day that if you worked in the Bank and you were
working in a given country you sat with your colleagues
in a back office somewhere and just kind of rated these countries. and it was very important because it determined how much money
a country was gonna get in the lending portfolio. So these were not insignificant and you never told the country
what their ratings were. It was very kind of secretive. Ultimately, these kind of got publicized and shared with countries
and then made public. So it's a very different system now the idea was that you were
looking at these kinds these kinds of dimensions and criteria, and when the World Bank's
evaluation group went to look at what was the impact of World Bank, civil
service lending on these, these institutional ratings,
they found they didn't go up even if that country had a
civil service reform project. So it really wasn't
making much of an impact. They also found that predictably, I think, civil service
reform programs again, do worse in, or projects do worse in poor countries. So again, this is this conundrum. If you have a poor
country with low capacity and your civil service is not
going to do so well either, and the projects didn't didn't do as well as the ones that were
taking place in more, in better endowed countries, and the other thing that
they found was that where within the World Bank, if
you went in to do a project or lending operation in another field, and even in public financial
management, it was a De Rigueur that you went in and did
a whole lot of diagnosis. You did a lot of analytic
work, I mean, often for a year or two before you went in and made a loan, but in the case of civil service
reform, that didn't happen. The resources just
didn't go into that kind of diagnostic work, and that was probably
one of the explanations for why things didn't work so well, and of course, the other
finding was that the number of people working on civil
service reform with real training in the area and dedicated experts, the coefficients were
way lower than for a lot of other sectors. So those are some of the results. I wanted to just sort of go through a list of some of the constraints and problems that have maybe contributed
to these somewhat disappointing results, or just
to say something about why this is such a tough field. So one thing is just about
aid and the aid model, and this is, a topic that I think lots of
people have been talking about for quite a while, but it
has particular implications for civil service reform and development. So it's really about the projects. So, you know, aid projects will, let's say you have a project
for a few million dollars, $10 million, in Cambodia, 'cause
I'm gonna say something about Cambodia, where I did
a lot of work and, you know the project is maybe
trying to improve education or build a school or build hospitals or whatever it is, these projects they have what they call
project implementation units, and they're supposed to
make that project run you know, like clockwork, and what happens often is
that those projects siphon off the best people from government. So people who would go
into the civil service, again, they don't want it, they're making, in these countries where the civil service is so badly paid, any skilled individual is much better off going to work for one of these aid projects itself working for a project implementation unit, and so, you know, they'll go
and get a much higher salary. So these projects are basically poaching people from the civil service, either would-be civil
servants or civil servants who've just had it or decided to go work for
an aid project itself, or sometimes these projects actually bring in civil servants and they pay them. They're sitting civil servants, they've got a job in the civil service but they go and they sit
in a project unit for let's say, five years that
the project is extant, and they're paid a salary supplement. So they're not really doing
their civil service job. They're going to work on this project. So this is a way of kind of draining the talent
out of the civil service, and part of this is you
know, this is perpetuated partly because donors like it, donors have a collective action problem. So they prefer to have these projects like building the school
or building the hospital or the bridge and planting the flag, you know, this is what we
did with, you know, different from the UK, or the Australian aid agency. This is what we can go back and show our constituents
back in Canberra or London, you know, we've done
something and here it is it's palpable, it's on the ground. Those are demonstrable results. They're often kind of, you can show them in the short term and they're
much easier to achieve and get kind of credit
for, political credit back home certainly, then are these longer term
institutional development results where, you know, you might not, instead of having a project going and actually delivering the, anti-malarial protocol, you know, you would be training people in government, locals
to be doing this work. and that would be a much longer kind of institutional
development sort of approach, and that would be less visible to the constituents back home. A lot of this is the argument
that Bill Easterly makes in a seminal piece that he wrote called "The Cartel of Good Intentions," where all the donors
are kind of colluding, maybe unintentionally or
with the best of intentions, but this is the model that
they've kind of developed. So, you know, when I was working in Cambodia, a bunch of
people were trying to think well, how could we maybe get a way, find a way to, instead of
having donors kind of fragment all their activities in a gazillion different projects in Cambodia, maybe have
them pull their funds and pay civil servants better so that you actually have
capable people to do the work, and you build, you know, the institution of the
civil service over time, and I will tell you that starting, you know, with the World Bank, but having sort of try to
persuade a lot of other donors in the field, even very progressive kind of open-minded, enlightened donors, they just wouldn't or couldn't do it. They really felt that
they had to have this. They had to be able to plant
this flag in the ground and have their own, perhaps
quite little, project but something that they could go back and show the folks back home. So I think that this is a major deterrent to civil service reform, and it has been well discussed
at high levels of, you know international meetings
of the DAC and other assemblages of the donor community. Everyone knows it's a problem,
but because of this kind of collective action
problem, it's difficult for donors to kind of
move beyond this behavior, and I would just say just on the aid, the way in which aid does harm, it's also about what happens
within aid organizations. The incentive structures
within the World Bank or other aid organizations and in the Bank, what you
got, if you were staff, if you were staffing the World Bank and you were managing a project,
you're gonna get rewarded by putting together that project,
bringing it to the board. and then the perfect
thing for your career, the perfect career move for
you to make is to move on, and not stick around and wait
to implement that project and see that it's supervised
correctly over a period of years, because that means
your career is stalled. So you need to keep moving, and that also kind of
contributes, I think, to this, the lack of accountability for
these institutional results over a longer period of time. The other, I think, complication
or sort of a constraint that I've, mentioned is politics. When, the evaluation arm of the
World Bank went in and looked at the record of these civil
service reform projects. I mean, it became very
clear that the problems weren't technical, because
it wasn't that difficult to figure out how to design
an automated payroll system, an information management system
to keep track of personnel, but what was really
difficult were the politics and the resistance and opposition to a lot of the reforms that
we're going to be resulting in winners and losers. I think I mentioned when
I came into the Bank, I was one of three political scientists, and I will tell you that the other two wouldn't admit to being
political scientists when we were in the Bank
but that's really changed. So there are a lot more
people coming in with that, with my kind of background. and there has been, you know, real shift in the staffing profile
of places like the Bank and certainly in amongst the other donors, but at the same time, even
though there has been quite a lot of work now in trying to figure out how do you kind of, develop a way to analyze
politics that will really inform the decisions you're making about the, the investments
in civil services or a lot of other kind of investment areas that the Bank gets involved in. There really never has been, this hasn't really been mainstreamed and there have been a lot of approaches, but
they're kind of diffused, and there hasn't been a
kinda coherent, cohesive effort to really instill
this in every decision made about operations, certainly on civil service reform, but even about the other
investment portfolios in the Bank. So I think there's still quite a way to go on this agenda, that there
hasn't been, there's a path to go down. and, but having said this, I think that there's
some of the other donors are less constrained than the World Bank, which has in its charter, a proscription from getting involved in sovereign politics of its borrowers. So it's really not supposed
to make any judgments on the basis of politics, but again, if you think about,
you know, reform programs, I mean, they're so political that if you don't take
politics into consideration, you're gonna end up with
this kind of failed agenda, but at the same time, there's a kind of, I think that charter,
and also the fact that it's just been largely
staffed by economists and engineers and some
other technical specialties. It just makes it more less likely or an institution
that's less inclined to go down this political path, whereas there some other donors like the UN and certainly a number of the bilaterals who are
much more engaged in this, this political agenda,
and particularly as more and more of the recipients
of aid are actually fragile post or even inter-conflict
countries where the politics are really prominent. So just a couple of other
problems or a few other problems I wanted to, let me just go back here. So one is just, this is
a long lamented problem but it's still very important, I think, is that just what are
realistic expectations about how you reform the civil service and what can really be expected? I think I was mentioning
the short time leash on structural adjustment lending but it's also true of projects. I mean, even if you're not,
even if you're just going in and providing this kind of incremental aid to help government
get its payroll function in shape or whatever, I
mean, these are still, or trying to introduce
these merit-based reforms. I mean, projects are usually about maybe at most a five year kind of proposition, and these are reforms that, you know, really take a
much longer period of time, and certainly the idea of
introducing merit-based recruitment or promotion, you know, if you look at civil
service reforms historically, which is what Merilee Grindle did in her incredibly good
book, "Jobs for the Boys," which I recommend to you, you know, she found that these attempts
to introduce merit-based civil services took centuries,
still are taking centuries, and that often, these kinds of practices of merit-based procedures, cohabited with patronage systems,
and not necessarily, this is just something
that went on over time and weren't never entirely replaced, patronage kinds of relationships, and so that's something I think that to understand the history
is really an important, an important step that I
think we need to be making about these reforms. The other, I think the other problem I think that plagues civil service reforms and the broader public
administration agenda is it's very difficult
to draw a causal link between, you know, what you do upstream. Again, you introduced
merit-based practice in hiring. Well, how does that actually affect what gets done on the ground? Does that mean you have a
better program to deliver textbooks in schools, or, you know, how do you link up these kinds of upstream inputs and downstream outcomes? So there's a lot, a lot of
noise is around the metrics and measuring or evaluating the robustness of these report forms. So frankly, you know, even
to say things are a failure or success, it's just
very difficult to do that without some kind of way to
really analyze and measure it, and I think the absence of performance measures for these kinds of reforms is something that everyone's kind of aware of. and there's been a certain amount of development of what are, of indicators, you know, there's a whole
kind of cottage industry of developing indicators
to measure all kinds of things, including civil service reform, and the Bank has been working for now quite a while on developing actionable governance indicators
where you can really say okay, X number of people, excuse me, have been hired on the
basis of a merit-based exam. So we know that the, you know this government is moving
in the right direction. So these are some of the things that are kind of on the table and in trainings as we speak, but I think that, you know maybe the last problem I
wanna have to call attention to, I think this is the last one, is a pretty profound debate that has been kind of raging
about whether countries are, you know, whether the clients of the World Bank that
have been the recipients of these kinds of reform investments are
ready for these kinds of, merit-based or even
performance-based reforms, and I mean, that sounds
a bit condescending because, and I think
there's always a pushback on the part of countries that you know, why should we
adopt these Western systems? You know, these don't
really fit our reality, but I think he goes beyond that, and I, and you know, some
of the work that's been done by Douglas North and his
colleagues in talking about the political, and social and historical
moment where countries find themselves, you know, where whether they have a kind of openness to the types of merit based
reforms or of rejection of the patronage or, you know, corruption practices, corrupt practices that have been historically
kind of dominant, you know, whether it even
makes sense for a place like the World Bank to
go and push, you know, what looks like a kind of British, you know, civil service system
on some of these places, you know, is this really
a good use of money and does it make sense? So I think that is, you
know, definitely something to think about, and some
of the people who say well, no, it doesn't make sense, and what you find, if you go
in and push these reforms, is that a lot of governments are, they are practicing what
Lant Pritchett calls isomorphic mimicry, where, you know, a
government or a country will, will again, put in
place some formal system of merit-based recruitment
and the laws are on the books, and they're basically
sucking up to donors, and in fact, the behavior on the ground is really quite different. So that's kind of mimicking
a Western-style institution, but not really behaving in the
way that donors would like. So, well, I'm just gonna say also just that the, there is, I
think, you know, with all of this, there is a real
debate within this field about what is best practice
or what is good practice. So, you know, given the
fact that there are a lot of questions about Weberian bureaucracies, and there's a kind of constant change and evolution in the way
in which people think about what works and what
doesn't in government. That also kind of raises issues and challenges to the field in general. So let me just come back come down to my final set of points about what I think maybe we could do to make things work a bit better. One is just, you know, if
you go to the World Bank and you look at, you
know, you wanna research, maybe housing, food consumption or
agricultural production or whatever, you know,
you're gonna find a lot of databases that kind of give you cross-national information about what countries are doing, you know, in various parts of the world, and kind of quite granular data, but if you go and try, look comparatively across civil service, either pay and employment,
or performance data, it's very difficult if you won't find it. So one of the things I
think that would be useful to do is to kind of establish some kind of comparative data framework
so that we can start to think about performance in a more rigorous way. The other thing is of course,
I think we need to be changing aid habits, I talked a lot about that. So pooling funds, I mean,
donors could, instead of going into their own projects,
they could pool their funds and send it right into the budget so that they're actually
supporting the institutions you know, civil service institutions and others in the country context. The other idea that I think
is an interesting one is again to start to study what is this connection between the upstream
human resource management kinds of functions and
the downstream effects and some of the work that is being done by these randomized control trials you know, the randomistas, you know, I think it's quite interesting. I think there are limitations, but you know, there are lots of ways that you can start to look at the kind of granular
behavior and try to figure out does this actually make a difference on the ground to things people care about? I've talked about the
political work, and I think that needs to be expanded
deep, deepened and extended. One thing I just wanted to
say, just a couple more points. One is just that I haven't
talked about technology here but you know, there's always this question about whether you can kind of insert a new technology that will really sort of allow countries
to leapfrog over decades of historic evolution in order
to start to perform better, and that's certainly been
discussed a lot in terms of civil service modernization, and often,
you know, it's not the case, because you know, some
of these things, again, are very behavioral in nature and they're not technology dependent, but I think one of the things we found, actually in the Ebola crisis, was that some of these
kind of very interesting mobile sorts of platforms
for paying people were used for these Ebola workers who were actually, the governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone
were actually in arrears. I mean, these frontline
workers hadn't been paid in months, and yet they
were being asked to go out and, you know, risk their
lives and go the extra yard to deliver these health services, and so some of the technologies
that were introduced in that period, I think,
you know, gave some insight about how transformative these kinds of technological advances
can be, and maybe indeed help to leapfrog in some of the
areas where there's been some, a lot of, kind of resistance to change. Okay, this is my second to last point, and that is just that the, I
think that one of the things that's happening and you all know this, there's a global workplace revolution, you know, Google works very differently than, you know, than, you know, some steel factory did in, you
know, the early 20th century, you know, we're looking
at a lot of different ways to manage people, and I think this is
very, it's incumbent upon the donors and, and
countries to start thinking, rethinking these stale kinds of models, either, you know, the
performance-oriented model, of the new public management
or the Weberian models, certainly of the standard civil service, and then finally there is, also I think, a shift that's been taking place in the aid environment more broadly. I mean, there's a lot of work. I've been working with the
Overseas Development Institute about thinking about the future of aid. They're thinking a lot about
what development organizations like the Bank and others should be doing, but I think that it is really shifted in a way, a little bit, the
power, kind of calculus. So, you know, governments and
countries, client countries themselves are now much better
positioned to be able to say to a place like the Bank, which
is now competing with a lot of other donors. It's no longer the hegemonic
institution it used to be. This is the kind of reform
we're interested in, and that reform that you
wanna, want to sell us, is not of interest to us, and so I think that this is gonna be a
really interesting way for countries to choose
their own solutions and to choose them somewhat on
the basis of their networking with other countries that
are making their same kinds of autonomous choices. So
I'm gonna leave it there and hope that we can maybe
get into some of the issues. (audience applauding) - I wanna thank Dr. Nunberg for a really fascinating, thoughtful, comprehensive, and systematic
overview of just a huge, what is a huge topic area. and because it's so complex, I really thought it would be
great if we could call upon Professor Resh, he was the first person
I thought of when we knew that Dr. Nunberg would be speaking to us. My colleague, William
Resh, actually came to us from the faculty of the School of Public
and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. His area of expertise focuses on how institutional structures and political
environments affect the behavior and the perceptions of people working in public organizations. So what better line of
expertise to call upon, to comment upon the
presentation we've just heard. So, Professor Resh. (audience applauding) - Thanks and welcome. So it turns out that institution building is really hard, right. She's I think selling the
role of civil service reform within the World Bank a little bit short in terms of being under-under appreciated, as she put it there, under-understood. That's what she said. It does comprise about a
sixth of all World Bank loans, and so that's a lot of money, right, that's going towards
this institution building and public management reform, of course is no longer the stuff of these narrow technocratic concerns. as you put it, it's become
a much more political topic. Public management reform is featured often as a major agenda item in party manifestos and government programs,
reform ideas emerge within a network of
various interest groups, and individuals who are united in order to provide or
promote some common cause or agenda in a way that
influences government policy, and in this case a policy is how governments
are actually managed and typically, most
acutely in the direction that institutional power is nurtured and leveraged towards
particular interests. Public sector reform
has become the dominion of an increasingly dominant
class of management consultants and the economists, mostly with
private sector orientations. Also, academics and
political entrepreneurs, and as a function of the
influence of this private sector, of these private sector institutions, they want credible commitment, right. They want stability in these
markets that they're entering. With this has come the zeitgeist
story, the intellectual movement that she identified
as new public management. That's predominated debate in
reforms over recent decades, and it's first and foremost,
it seeks to treat governments as private businesses,
right, or like a business, and this ideology has informed a lot of the changes that the World
Bank has sought to institute, right, but in many ways, the World Bank and our speaker here recognize
that it's been partly diluted and partly merge with the
realities on the ground, but it's exceedingly
difficult to implement, right. Developing a science of administration has always been a preoccupation of political and management
thinkers for eons, and one major lesson that
repeats itself across time and various movements is
that there is no one best way or single specific or correct view of doing or viewing public administration. States, the concrete institutions and organizations and
people that deliver things like tax collection and social welfare et cetera, et cetera, are
fundamentally a function of the history, the culture,
the constitutional design and the resources that are
available to a given society as well as these ideas
that are actively engaged at some opportune time within
that society's history, and so prescriptions for
reform and I'll quote Christopher Pollitt here, "Often are much more ambitious "than the formal decisions
that eventually get taken, "and that there is then frequently "a substantial implementation
gap between what's intended, "and what actually happens," and this is indeed with this understanding that our distinguished speakers
talk was so enlightening because evaluations of public management reform have been ambiguous
or unconvincing at best. In many cases, at least
where they've been attempted. Public management reform has
frequently been more of an act of faith than a piece of
evidence-based policymaking. The recent explosion of these different international comparative
indicators of good governance and the like have not
fundamentally changed the state of affairs. So I would start the question
for our honorable guest by posing, like, I'm just
gonna throw out a ton of questions that I have,
but then I'll focus on one in particular, is first of
all, like what major lessons can be drawn from these
recent experiments in reform? What can we take from these
big models that are embraced and then they reconfigured,
then reconceptualize. Is there one model or a set of principles that that can or
should be applied everywhere? And I really think she spoke
to this a lot, but I wonder if the World Bank itself
is really cognizant of the relative fit of the
big ideas that they are trying to institute and the
fit of those big ideas to the on-the-ground realities
of implementing them, and recognizing the
public sector management is in and of itself fundamentally
a political enterprise. What extent is the political economy of the given country
understood and accommodated in the application of these
quote unquote best practices? Now those questions are several and in many respects they've
been covered quite eloquently in your talk, so I'll
start with the most direct. In most prescriptions for reform, we still see the MPM
model predominate, right, and it's used in this
word performance, right. So my first question is what
do we mean by performance in terms of government and is there, as I think,
if it is as I think, a contextually and often
politically dependent term, to what extent can we
compare performance gains in one government to another, and what indicators of success do you see as having, you know, the most promise in our modern age of reform, and I'll stop at that question, but to kind of give some subtext to that, what are we measuring
in terms of performance? How do you measure the soft power of state craft in diplomacy? Vis-a-vis, whether or not
your garbage is picked up, or the potholes are attended
to, how do you measure safety, and also if you're doing
so in terms of perhaps you know, general questionnaires
to the citizens, right, in terms of their general satisfaction, to what extent are we protecting
values such as due process and minority rights, and basic human rights that may be allotted to a large swath of one given society, but not to everyone, and to that, I thank you for the talk. It was illuminating, but I think that, I think that there's a lot
of conceptual ambiguity in the term performance itself, and that push towards a performance model, really in many, many times it kind of turns my stomach a little bit to hear like, oh, we
just want our governments to perform well, of course we do, but that definition of
what performance really is, seems to be very contextually dependent. So thank you very much - So, but I mean, I do think
I was very fast and loose with a lot of this terminology
and I absolutely agree that the performance issues
are just overwhelming and really daunting, and I
think you've put your finger on something I also struggle with. I mean, if you think about,
even in terms of the aid agenda, you know, I think it was,
I guess, was it last year? What year are we in that, you know, there was a kind of revision
of the, what are called the SDGs, the - Sustainable
- Sustainable development goals, and that used to be the MDGs, and this is all about kind of
the aid, you know, community in, you know, broadly
construed, trying to come up with performance indicators
and performance objectives so that they can kind
of track their progress, and there's so much debate about whether this is a
good thing to do or not, and certainly, you know, there's a kind of, you know, there's the
mantra I know you know, which is that what gets
measured gets done, and so, you know there's this tendency to kind
of try to wanna cram things into a measurement frame, into a performance measurement framework that really are elude that kind and certainly quantified
quantification or, you know, or, sort of, you know, very narrowly contoured measurement, or assessment, you know, just because it's, you know, it's very
appealing to have something concrete to look at, so I
mean, I agree that there is, you know, it's very difficult even for organizations broadly to think about how they assess their performance, and I think it's even more
difficult to tie the kinds of issues that I've been talking about in terms of human
resource management, again, the sort of upstream stuff with
what happens on the ground, and it's probably foolhardy to try to, you know, over, over-specify a kind of
measurement or performance measurement framework, but I think it's still,
it's still really difficult if you're in the business
of putting someone's money which is like the taxpayer's money, even if you're an
international institution, it's all basically coming from, you know, from the world's taxpayers, as it were, it's very difficult to argue that, you know, we should
just kinda keep investing in an area on the basis of faith. So I think these, you
know, these indicators, this indicator industry
that's kind of grown up, the global governance
indicators and so on. I mean, again they're
at a very macro level, some of the work that's
kind of focusing in on these actionable governance indicators is trying to sort of take them down to a place where they're a little bit more concrete, and I think that it
behooves the people thinking about how do we either
go back to the taxpayers or indeed the clients themselves, how do we know a program is working? I mean, you really still have
to have some way to evaluate whether things make a difference or else it is really faith and
that's the religion business. That's not a business I wanna be in you know, so, you know, it may be that there, I think there's
a lot less attention paid to qualitative evaluation
than maybe should be. and thinking about rigorous
ways to really go in and look at what's
happening on the ground, and maybe it's not something
that can be replicated and quantified, you know in, with big data, but
it may be that there's some, some way to go in and evaluate
again on a qualitative basis. I mean I do think these
random control trials are very interesting. I think they're very problematic also because they purport to be
looking in a scientific way, the way in which things are working and then they
over-generalize to, you know, to a lot of other contexts. So you know, that's kind of a,
I think, an interesting line of business, but maybe one where, you know there needs to be kind of some
thought about how to adapt it to these kinds of, sort of less, sort of less concrete, more
intangible sorts of issues. Sorry, this is kind of disjointed. - [Eric] We only have another,
maybe seven minutes or so. So I don't know if Professor
Resh has anything else he'd like to add. - No, I mean, obviously,
yes, we do want to measure the performance and we
wanna measure our kind of rate of return on
investment in many respects. and if you're a bank, right. My question was more about what indicators do you see as most promising, not as much as we should
just throw the baby out with the bath water, more so, given your
recognition of the importance of the political economy,
how do you adjust these types of performance indicators, so that they're not so you
know, isomorphic, so to speak, or like a coercive isomorphism where you're forcing
these performance metrics on everyone in a universal sense as opposed to accommodating
each political economy. - I mean, it's interesting, 'cause I'm thinking now
that a field, you know it's sort of tangential to
the one I've been working which is the public financial management and they've been working for now a number of years with these things
called the PEFA indicators. I don't know if you're familiar with this. It's a, oh gosh, what does it stand for? It's performance, public expenditure, PEFA, framework, something
financial assessment. So they go into countries and with experts actually, so they're not, but they're also using some
kind of common standards or indicators and they go in
and kind of do an assessment of how their public financial
management system is working, and the idea was initially that they, I mean, in theory,
it is that they will go into countries and say, you know how are you doing compared
to where you were before? So it's not supposed to
be on a comparative basis. Countries are not supposed to be competing with one another, but of
course they all do, you know, because they are public, you
know, documents and so on, but I think the idea behind that is like, where
is the starting place? Where is this country, in maybe in terms of its own objectives, in terms of its own political context, and maybe where it is and all
kinds of other contextual ways of, you know, it's, it's
difficult to compare Gambia with, you know, Latvia,
or whatever it might be. I mean, these are kind of apples
and oranges to some extent. So, I mean, I, you know, I
think there is a path forward that is looking at a particular context and saying, this
is progress along the path that this country wants to travel, but having said that, and
maybe just having worked in all these countries, you know, you do. I mean, I, I do remember walking into Russia, you know, just after the fall of the, you know, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and the minister sitting
across the table was saying you know, you don't understand
the Russian reality. You know, the World Bank comes here and you've got these kind of universal or, you know, uniform
standards that you wanna apply to us and we're different,
and I was just thinking that actually every country is different and thinks it's different
and is different, but at the same time, you know there are some common standards that may be need to be thought about, and it's an iterative
process that I think anybody working in, you know, on
the ground in these kinds of situations is constantly,
you know, feeling that tension, maybe that's a tension you
just have to live with. - Yeah. - The entire presentation does illustrate the rich sort of, a non-linear exchange between ideas. Here, you could see how
many different theories and different authors were cited in terms of understanding
what was happening, in terms of actual practice, in terms of the World Bank's approach to civil service reform, right, and so, and of course
what's happening in terms of, on the ground as these
attempts set engendering reforms unfold and as we
learn from those experiences, that in turn comes back to those of us who are working primarily in academia and thinking about, well,
how, how do we rethink this? And it's, I think the
presentation we have, and indeed, the the ongoing
career that Dr. Nunberg exemplifies shows that there's a very rich you know, there's a very rich interaction, and it can be frustrating
at times when you're taking on big, big projects and seeing whether things
don't always unfold as you'd like, but, I think at the core, there is something in terms of development
that we all believe that there is something
there worth nurturing, and it is hard to define exactly, and it is hard to pinpoint, and it is contextual
and it changes over time and it reflects our own
biases and our own thinking, but that's life, and we all live it, and we
appreciate your helping us think about how we engage it ourselves, and again, my thanks to my
colleague William Resh as well. Thank you. (audience applauding)
