• Civil service reform

Civil service reform

This paper sets out the analytical framework that was used in designing a series of surveys of the views of public officials concerning their institutional environment and in analyzing the information that was generated in 15 countries.

It describes how the survey results help to map the strengths and weaknesses of a public sector, and offers an approach for identifying potential pay-offs from reform interventions. Above all, the framework emphasizes the heterogeneity of incentives and institutional arrangements within the public sector – and the need for policy makers to have information that moves beyond generalities and indicates what is most likely to work and where.

In building on the premise that public officials’ actions – and hence the performance of their organizations – depend upon the institutional environment in which they find themselves, this framework avoids any simplistic anti-government positions, without attempting a defensive justification for poor performance.

Types of reforms discussed include:

• strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for record management, for training, and for recruitment;
• ensuring that staff support government policy;
• preventing political interference or micromanagement;
• assuring staff that they will be treated fairly; and making government policies consistent

The framework offers an approach for understanding both good and bad performance and for presenting the results to policy makers in a format that lead to more informed choices about reform interventions. It also responds to concerns in many recent reviews of public sector reform interventions.

(adapted from the authors’ summary)

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