Dr Jamal Khan : (From previous issue) : Conflicts, frictions and rivalries between central ministries and operating ministries are replete with complaints that central agencies tend to function in an imperious manner. What is notable is that the work of central agencies includes some of the most challenging and creative that the public sector has to offer. To illustrate, there could exist a public management ministry which could be placed under the ambit of the office of the prime minister. The fact is that there are certain functions which are in the nature of controls over the entire public sector. There are four such controls, viz. finance, budgeting, establishment and planning. Almost unvaryingly, operating agencies are apt to resent such supervisory control. It is useful, then, to place such organisations in an executive president’s secretariat or in a prime minister’s office, having considerable political/policy clout. Of course, such allocation applies more to establishment and planning and less to finance and planning.
While mapping out management development, the concept of an integrated multifunctional public sector ministry comes up. Conceptually, such an agency seems to be an ideal approach to managerialisation, effectiveness, planning, and management support services in a single agency. In practice, however, this approach has not borne much fruit. The danger is that the mere congregation of now-separate agencies into a single ministry – without correcting the current practices and approaches – may create a monolith or behemoth being restrictive and wielding centralised power. The effect, then, may be further subordination and attenuation of operating organisations and weakening of programme developments.
On the other hand, mechanisms for continuous reform, learning and improvement should, instead, be built into each ministry and agency.
In effect, management development and performance monitoring should be a permanent process; every key organisation should be a partner in the management system development; information, problems, constraints and successes should be shared among strategic agencies; and outmoded managerial, organisational, procedural and legal practices should be replaced. Towards these ends, governments may establish organisations, bringing together personnel periodically, conducting reviews and checking management development in the entire sector, executing specific management/organisation development initiatives, examining operational problems relating to public sector reforms, synergising the management support services which normally operate in isolation from each other, and serving as a clearinghouse for receiving inter-organisational feedback and disseminating information to the larger society.
SOME developing-country governments agree that there is a need for an institutional modality whereby ministry secretaries and general managers could meet with each other and exchange evaluations as to what needs to be done to provide sector-wide management development. In some countries, for example, it assumes the form of a board of executive managers consisting of senior personnel and meeting periodically to take action in targeted areas and report to a predetermined contact point. From all reports, the modality works reasonably well. In other countries, still other efforts have been made to energise sluggish organisations.
To make public management more change-oriented, pressures from donor and international agencies have led some systems to the centralisation of decision-making and the dominance of the finance ministry. However, where populism is strong, the finance ministry, having been dislodged from its position of a final arbiter of the financial allocation, has been rightly subordinated to the political directorate.
Given the trend of populism, the direction of financial and economic policies and financing is unlikely to be coherent at all times. Popular pressure tends to go immediately to the top of the policy system which feels the need to respond immediately – but not necessarily via institutional, organisational and management processes – with the effect that decision-making becomes spontaneous, catching the middle levels of management by surprise.
In other contexts, planning is being taken away from the orthodox civil service and is being transferred to separate specialist institutions staffed by a new developmental coalition.
The civil service is now counterpoised to a new management format, more adequately remunerated, more in integrated with and reflecting the concerns of the political directorate, have more status and visibility, less committed to long-term careers in the public sector, and less committed to a rulebook view of public organisation. The growing practice has entailed employing special advisers and sector-external specialists as ministry super-secretaries by way of lateral entries on a contractual basis.
Special advisers, for example, are expected to provide access to grassroots information, keep communication lines open with the masses and maintain pipelines into the views, reactions and ideas of the people.
Criticisms of such unfolding are, however, intensive. Despite the concern about civil service inertia and sluggishness, many are worried about the effect such trend is having – and may have in future – on the established civil service, worried about the extended use of non-civil-service professionals sapping the morale of the career personnel, anxieties about creeping politicisation, and worried about relational tension between special advisers and public employees.
In still other contexts, national advisory councils have come on board, which look at development planning, management developments in the public sector, the efficiency issue in public enterprises, plan/programme evaluation, public sector tendering, implementation procedures, accountability, achievement orientation, management training, efficient provision of routine outputs, and pressing national problems. The council is seen as a catalytic agent that can bring together management and technical personnel from various organisations in an attempt to harmonise and orchestrate their development programmes. The council’s rationalisation is that, with regular agencies tending to go about their business without conscious of what others are doing, it can plug such information gaps and ameliorate inter-organisational coordination within a tight time/cost frame. A well-known criticism of this modality is that implementation and not advice is what is needed and evaluation and not operation/management is needed.
Since decolonisation and independence, some reforms and changes have been attempted to streamline and trim organisational/managerial practices inherited from the colonial times. The structures, for example, were patched, extended and some changes were effected here and there. It is clear, however, that a great deal needs to be done by way of planned changes if the system is to remain competitive and is not to collapse under the crushing weight of customer demands.
In many countries since the 1940s, structural reform, behaviour modification and performance appraisal were put in place. Sadly, the prescriptions were shelved by the ruling classes and special interests. Yet, year after year ad nauseam politicians complain about the inefficiency of the public sectors and call for reform. One wonders whether policy-makers/politicians are genuinely committed to reform and advancement or merely go through easy and ready motion.
Many are deeply suspicious about real politician motives, arguing that they are not into systemic and long-term reform and actually fear reforms because these may inhibit their unbridled power and their penchant for ad hoc incrementalism, fire-fighting, frequent interference and patronage dispensation. Regrettably and repeatedly, we have experienced the urgency fading in the distance, enthusiasm for an improved public management disappearing, plans are not executed, attention gets deflated, priorities shift, blue-ribbon commissions are set up which eventually fizzle out and reform drives flounder on the rocks of opportunism or indifference. Cynicism flows: the more we change, the more we remain the same.
Given the tension and rivalry existing between politicians and personnel, politicians sometimes tend to see reforms in adversarial and conspiratorial terms. This is the paradox here in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Reforms and changes often tend to be deferred or weakened because politicians seem to believe that they may stand to lose in the power struggle with career personnel. International agencies, for instance, increasingly complain that qualified and dedicated employees are not assigned to running routine programmes or managing development projects, that governments falter in coordinating routines, programmes and projects, that employee morale is low, that workplace is cramped and archaic, that the working conditions are sometimes primitive, that information storage and retrieval are limited, that lost time and diminished effectiveness are recurrent, and that decision-making and output deliveries are slow and hesitant.
In some countries, the head of government and the cabinet tend to use almost any platform – television, radios, print media, news conferences, party conventions and budget speeches – to lambaste public personnel for inaction, red-tape and villainy. A fundamental flaw is bared: the absence of a clear-sighted, long-term and positive commitment to the creation and continuity of a permanent and rational structure for initiating, implementing, sustaining and evaluating much-needed public sector reforms.
When all is said and done, we should all bear in mind that management developments in the public sector require developmentalist change orientation, futurist time orientation, proactive action orientation, top-drawer leadership, steadfast support and popular mobilisation. Bangladesh is not an isolated community, and cannot be, an exception to this postulate.
(Concluded)
(Dr Jamal Khan was professor of public sector management at the University of the West Indies. jamalabedakhan@ hotmail.com.)
