less is more: civil service reform in africa
TRANSCRIPT
Callahan 1
Ryan Callahan
Professor Natsios
INAF-353: Issue Paper
April 12, 2010
Less is More: Civil Service Reform in Africa
From the 1980s to today, public sector reform has been a consistent strategic priority of
the development community, accelerated by the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs.
At the heart of these reforms in each country—public sector employees who have found
themselves caught in the crossfire of African behavioral norms and Western performance
expectations. At varying times and from several Western perspectives, these African countries’
civil services have been criticized for being too large, slow, inefficient, lazy, corrupt,
uncommitted, and especially, beholden to “neo-patrimonial” cultural norms that inhibit the
growth of democracy. The pressure is not waning. The more that “governance” comes to be
seen as the keystone for peace and prosperity, greater is the pressure put upon African
governments to curb corruption, improve performance, and embrace reform.
This paper will take as its departure the case of Liberia, a post-conflict country that as
recently as 2005 had no functioning institutions of democratic governance or civil service and
whose current government has displayed the political will to improve governance and build a
democratic society. Development scholar Steve Radelet has stated that “the government is
aiming to build a more professional and better paid civil service, and introduce systems that
guard against corruption and ensure transparency and accountability.”1 Certainly, political will
1 Radelet, Steve. “Reviving Economic Growth in Liberia.” Center for Global Development: Working Paper 133. November 2007.
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for reform is crucial, but similar goals have been set for many civil service reform projects in
African countries over the last 30 years, and few of them have been able to claim success. While
it may be the case that some countries are making progress, be it incremental, the long time
horizon necessary to see substantial progress in reforms of government and society cannot
unburden the development community from asking critical questions about the design and
execution of civil service reform efforts to date. In Liberia’s case, the opportunity to learn from
the mistakes of past civil service reform programs is a valuable one, and it is toward that end that
this paper will critique the prevailing attitudes of the development community toward civil
service reform.
In this paper, I will examine the New Public Management (NPM) approach that grew out of
the efficiency drive of structural adjustment programs. This approach remains the dominant
paradigm for civil service reform today. In many ways, it is ill-suited to the task. I will advocate
for a greater influence for African context-specific needs in designing civil service reform
programs in an alternative to NPM based on the experiences of Ghana and Uganda. Douglass
North’s description of modernizing societies, Larry Harrison’s culturalist critique of
development, and Merilee Grindle’s compromise of ‘good enough governance’ will inform the
discussion and I will attempt to privilege empirical evidence and African perspectives in charting
a path forward.
I. Early Civil Service Reform Efforts in Africa
In the second half of the 20th century, newly democratized African states engaged in the
“Africanization” of their civil services to replace colonial administrators with African ones. In
many states, the size and influence of the state ballooned as governments were called upon to
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engage in state-building, nation-building, and economy-building in the pluralistic vacuum left by
a colonial power’s departure. Some autocratic rulers and socialist regimes further centralized
power and grew the size of the executive branch to support state-controlled industries. Personal
patronage and ghost employees swelled the ranks of the civil service even further.
By the 1980s, the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs, designed to restore
macroeconomic stability to poor and heavily indebted African countries, were targeting civil
services for reform. These reforms focused heavily on the structural factors inhibiting the
efficient delivery of public services. In particular, the Bank advocated for shrinking its overall
size of the public sector, improving pay structures, and reducing costs (including those from
corruption) to improve the climate for private sector investment and export-led development.
Evaluations of these programs in the late 1990s found that they were generally ineffective;
although it was relatively easy to eliminate ghost employees and lay off the worst-performing
workers, improvements in governance were still elusive. Focus shifted to improving
“performance” and evaluating the progress of indicators of good governance—especially
transparency and accountability.2
II. New Public Management
From the drive for better results and improved service delivery to citizens came the
application of New Public Management programs to Africa in the late 1990s into the 2000s. It
remains the dominant paradigm of public administration reform in the developed world and the
development community today. In 2003, the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa esteemed
NPM as a “business approach to running the affairs of state,” featuring “efficiency of service
2 Olowu, Bamidele. "Redesigning African Civil Service Reforms." Journal of Modern African Studies 37.1 (1999): Pages 1-5
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delivery and promoting accountability and ethical values.”3 Amid discussions of organizational
structure, accounting practices, and financial management, reform advocates saw the need to
address what they saw as “a deficit of ethical norms” in order to achieve NPM’s goals. Calling
for a “new culture of participation, accountability, and transparency,” it was clear that their
technocratic business-like approach to governance would require instilling business-like mindset
in the individuals executing the public services.4 Without civil servants that would act
“ethically”, the performance of the civil service and the reform of the public sector could be put
into jeopardy.
The difficult pursuit of “performance” through NPM led some to bemoan the African social
and cultural norms that were seen as undermining reform efforts. From a Western perspective, it
seems logical to wonder why, if so many corporations were able to improve corporate
governance and service delivery through transparency, accountability, and performance
management, African governments could not. NPM reformers had to expand their focus to
include some local factors, with culture at the center. A 2003 World Bank report introduced the
governance diamond (a four-part conception of institutions impacting governance, including
formal political institutions, bureaucracy, political interests, and the economy) and lamented
African “neopatrimonial spiral” that undermined bureaucratic performance by delegitimizing
formal institutions.5 Others went further, noting that African organizations themselves have
3 Development Policy Management Division. “Public Sector Management Reforms in Africa: Lessons Learned. Economic Commission for Africa Report. 2003. Page 49.
4 Ibid. Page 51.5 Levy, Brian and Sahr Kpundeh, Eds. Building State Capacity in Africa: New Approaches,
Emerging Lessons. Washington: The World Bank Institute. 2004. Chapter 1.
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particular characteristics not conducive to reform that are “rooted in social values, and will not
be easy to change.”6
III. The Development Community’s Responses to Socio-cultural Frustrations
NPM reformers were not unwise to the challenge of African socio-cultural values to their
efforts, but they remained unsure of the best strategy to push back against a neopatrimonial
culture whose values did not easily mesh with individual accountability and performance-based
management. Entrenched as reformers were in the business mindset, it was even remarked that
“like a mutual fund investing in high-risk equities, many donor investments in civil service
reform will yield unimpressive results, but a small number of winners will make the whole
portfolio shine.”7 The prevailing mindset was that success could be possible under the right
conditions in the country being reformed, but for the most part, conditions were inhospitable, and
due in no small part to cultural dynamics. As Larry Diamond describes the detrimental effect of
this culture in the public sector, “state offices at every level become permits to loot, either for an
individual or a somewhat wider network of family members, ethnic kin, political clients, and
business cronies.”8 The question then to be answered by reformers was how to deal with this
cultural environment within the framework of NPM, or more broadly within any performance-
based measures of reform.
There appear to be five principle responses to the issue in the development literature, which I
will detail and critique here:
6 Wescott, Clay. "Guiding Principles on Civil Service Reform in Africa: An Empirical Review." The International Journal of Public Sector Management 12.2 (1999): Page 151
7 Ibid. Page 166.8 Diamond, Larry. "The Rule of Law Versus The Big Man." Journal of Democracy 19.2 (2008):
Page 145.
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1. Corporate Governance – Acknowledge the existence of neopatrimonialism in the civil
service, but discourage it on a structural level through formal business structures like auditing
and monitoring of performance through skilled managers.9
2. Prosecution – Acknowledge its existence, but punish it quickly and consistently on the
individual level through the judiciary and legal structures.10
These approaches attempt to mediate between the business mindset and the perceived threat
of African cultural values through enforceable rules and institutions. They have similar
drawbacks. The first is human resources capacity: auditing and investigating crimes require
education and financial resources, and it is a struggle to maintain truly independent institutions
for accountability—they can easily become politicized tools of the elite, assuming they exist at
all.11 Furthermore, the institutions themselves can become corrupt and in any case, are rarely
efficient and can take years to make definitive rulings.
3. Demand-driven – Acknowledge its existence, but contain it through consumer monitoring,
surveys and polls, and civil society activism.12
This approach demands a robust civil society (especially the media) that is empowered to
access information about the functioning of their government and have recourse to publish that
information and shame the state into improving governance. It has also been suggested that
“eGovernment”—accessing public records via the Internet or other technologies could enhance
this monitoring capacity.13 The role of the media is central to this approach, and training 9 Development Policy Management Division, Ibid. Page 52.10 Diamond, Ibid. Page 147.11 Ayee, Joseph. Reforming the African Public Sector. Council for the Development of Social
Science Research in Africa. Dakar: Imprimerie Graphiplus. 2008. Pg. 130.12 Langseth, Petter. "The Civil Service Reform Programme in Uganda." Public Administration and
Development 15.4 (1995): Page 376.13 Development Policy Management Division, Ibid. Page 36.
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programs for journalists are suggested as a means of strengthening public accountability.
Unfortunately, this approach presupposes the existence of the sort of liberal political rights that
are all too rare in authoritarian or democratizing African states.
4. Individual Overhaul - Change the prevailing culture of neopatrimonialism through human
resource development, codes of conduct, and training about its negative effects, including
screening in the recruiting process of civil servants.14
Rather than responding to instances of corruption when they do occur, this approach seeks to
reform the individuals operating within the civil service through re-training and codes of
conduct. These can be important demonstrations of commitment, but only if instituted at all
levels of an organization and only with a credible enforcement mechanism.
5. Social Overhaul - Change the prevailing culture of neopatrimonialism completely through
wide-ranging reform. For example, an evaluation of the Ugandan Civil Service Reform
program concluded by suggesting that “rebuilding Uganda involves remaking all aspects of
Ugandan society—from the physical infrastructure to the soul and spirit of the nation.”15
“Bottom-up” proposals to improve governance suggested by NPM reformers place their hope
in instilling ethical values conducive to NPM governance in universities or other educational
institutions. However, even if governments were receptive to such measures, the process of
cultural change would take generations and would likely undermine traditional societal structures
and cause social instability, which could itself set back development.
14 Ayee, Ibid. Page 138.15 Langseth, Ibid. Page 338.
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Ultimately, like most governance reform attempts, the strategies proposed to mitigate the
harm done to the NPM reform agenda are at the mercy of resource constraints, time, and political
climate. This makes their success unlikely. But over and above those practical concerns is a
philosophical one: in all the strategies proposed, the African culture is treated as an adversary to
be overcome or eliminated. This approach cannot be successful, and indeed it has proven so in
some of the democratizing states where it has been tried. To examine further the interaction
between NPM and the African civil service, Uganda and Ghana present themselves as useful
case studies as they have been the subject of long-standing reform efforts whose effects have
been examined in the development literature.
IV. Uganda and Ghana
The Ugandan civil service reform program began in 1992 to reform an “inefficient,
demoralized, and unresponsive” civil service. The approach utilized “Result-Oriented
Management” and aimed to introduce a “performance appraisal system” using measurable
indicators. A 1995 review noted that Ugandan program has been quite successful in reducing
the size of the civil service, decentralizing authority, and improving pay rates. However,
corruption was cited as a continuing major problem, with great emphasis placed on fighting
corruption, using all of the measures outlined in section III.16 Although Ugandan civil service
reform efforts were able to make blunt structural changes, the impact on the behavior of
individual employees was minimal. Indeed, Uganda still ranks far below neighbors Zambia,
Rwanda, and Malawi in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009,
16 Langseth , Ibid. Pages 367 and 381.
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13th-lowest in Africa and 130th out of 180.17 Even with strong political support, NPM reforms
were frustrated by patronage networks and neopatrimonial cultural legacies.
Beginning in 1995, the Ghanaian civil service reform program aimed to “develop the
capacity of the Ghana civil service to deliver effective, efficient, and customer oriented service.”
Among the interventions described were to “motivate civil servants towards results oriented
practice” and to ensure that high performance was achieved through “transparent, competent,
accountable, and cost-effective” functioning.18 A 2008 review of the program by development
scholars in Ghana and the UK found that the process was too “mechanistic” and failed to
appropriately target interventions, noting that too many occurred at once, spreading resources too
thin. Employee morale and support for reform remained low and political will quickly waned.19
Another report found that the NPM technique of decentralization of authority resulted in
increased opportunities for patronage and corruption, including “outright embezzlement” enabled
by poor performance monitoring of decentralized institutions by central government authorities.20
The World Bank has called the Ghanaian performance improvement program a “building
without foundations” that suffered from insufficient political and financial resources and made
no progress.21
After 15 years of NPM-based civil service reform in Ghana, there is very little to be
encouraged by. Neglect and ignorance of Ghanaian organizational culture in the design and
17 Transparency International. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2009.” http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table.
18 Antwi, K.B., F. Analoui, and D. Nana-Agyekum. "Public Sector Reform In Sub-Saharan Africa." Public Administration and Development 28 (2008): 253-64. Page 258.
19 Antwi, Ibid. Page 261.20 African Peer Review Mechanism, 2005, Country Review Report and Programme of Action of the
Republic of Ghana. Qtd. in Ayee, Ibid. Page 112.21 Levy, Brian and Sahr Kpundeh, Eds. Building State Capacity in Africa: New Approaches,
Emerging Lessons. Washington: The World Bank Institute. 2004. Page 71.
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implementation of reforms prevented their success. Indeed, the Ghanaian authors of the 2008
report declared at its conclusion that “reform in the 21st century will hardly succeed without
contextualizing reform efforts within country specific realities including its history, culture,
politics, economy, sociology, ideology, and values.”22 Toward this end, we will continue now to
elaborate on the proper role of African ethics in civil service reform.
V. The Proper Role of African Ethics in Civil Service Reform
As Ghanaian scholar Joseph Ayee has written, “without a successful enhancement of ethics,
accountability and transparency resulting from the curbing of corruption, very few reform efforts
in Africa will succeed.”23 Development practitioners and theorists must come to realize that the
convenience of transplanting Western business principles to African governance is far
outweighed by the disappointment of their probable ultimate failure. It is the intention of this
paper to frame ethical consideration as a pragmatic necessity for successful governance
improvement and to distinguish this “consideration” from efforts to reshape cultural forces to the
advantage of the existing paradigm of civil service reform. If treating African culture as an
adversary to be contained or transformed has led to frustration and stagnation, then a new
approach is demanded. Indeed, the development literature has called for “creativity” and
“experimentation and eclecticism” in response to the difficulties of implementing NPM
reforms.24,25
To properly consider African ethics in the context of civil service reform, we must adopt
what has been termed the “culturalist” hypothesis; according to this view, NPM principles, even
22 Antwi, Ibid. Page 263.23 Ayee, Ibid. Page 131.24 Polidano, Charles. “The new public management in developing countries.” IDPM Public Policy
and Management Working Paper #13. November 1999.25 Wescott, Ibid. Page 151.
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the most basic ones like “performance” are not easily transferable, if they are transferable at all,
to all cultures.26 NPM reformers have resisted this approach, contending that a universalist
perspective is valid for NPM’s management principles.27 As a result, one evaluation of NPM
programs concluded that “the proponents of NPM have underestimated the culture clash that lies
underneath a change towards the principles of NPM.”28 This evaluation was of a program in the
Netherlands! The cultural gulf between the western Weberian tradition of management that
underpins NPM and most African societies demands that westerners reconsider their instinctive
conceptualizations of good governance.29 NPM seems natural, well-ordered, and right to
scholars raised in the liberal individualist tradition of the modern West. It can be just as foreign,
unnatural, and anathema to someone from another cultural background and this dissonance can
generate such resistance and confusion as to doom reform efforts from the outset. Admitting that
one’s own “universal” good may have no place in a civil service reform program is a difficult,
rare, and necessary step. NPM is not alone in its reluctance to consider cultural factors.
Speaking broadly about development efforts in relation to culture, a controversial theory
advanced by Larry Harrison attacks the “insufficient attention [that] has been paid to cultural
values and attitudes that can powerfully influence for good or for bad the political, economic,
and social behavior of individuals and societies.”30
If cultural values in Africa are powerfully influencing civil reform efforts, then we must
endeavor to better understand what they are and what social patterns and norms they predispose.
26 Antwi, Ibid. Page 254.27 Polidano, Ibid.28 Noordhoek, Peter and Raymond Saner. “Beyond New Public Management: Answering the
Claims of Both Politics and Society.” Public Organization Review. 5:35-53. (2005) Page 39.29 Landell-Mills, Pierre. "Governance, Cultural Change, and Empowerment." The Journal of
Modern African Studies 30.4 (1992): 543-67. Page 543.30 Harrison, Larry. Culture Matters Research Project: Executive Summary. Fletcher School of
Diplomacy, Tufts University. April 2003.
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This is a largely neglected question in civil service reform literature, which tends to note only the
incompatibility of African values without characterizing them (except at times clumsily—one
UN report noted the aversion to hierarchy in African societies).31 A 1996 study commissioned
by the Swedish International Development Agency is an exception to this trend; in it, the authors
begin with the premise that “the key to successful development and reform was the adoption of
measures rooted in the specific organizational environment concerned” and attempt to better
understand what the optimal structures and attitudes are for the leaders and managers African
organizations. This is a laudable effort, one that seeks to improve organizational structure by
focusing on the relational needs of supervisors and employees.
The study itself sought to understand the dynamics of change based on the contributions of
“manager” types, who would keep the day-to-day operations of the organization running, versus
“leader” types, who would provide the vision and drive for change.32 This distinction is reflected
in modern corporate structure with a COO as manager and CEO as leader. As it turned out, the
subjects of the study (which took place in a Botswana ministry) did not share the same
conceptualization and could not articulate the values they preferred in leader types because they
did not share the same assumptions about the purpose of leaders and the natural ordering of an
authority relationship. Faced with this reality, the authors then set about understanding the
dominant paradigm of African managerial relations, using sociological studies from as early as
1980. The results could hardly be more damning to NPM assumptions. In reference to the one
of the broadest tenets of NPM, the ideal of improving “performance” was destined to be
undermined in an environment where “managers are overwhelmingly concerned with the quality
31 Development Policy Management Division, Ibid. Page 50.32 Jones, Merrick L., Peter Blunt, and Keshav C. Sharma. "Managerial Perceptions of Leadership
and Management in an African Public Service Organization." Public Administration and Development 16 (1996): 455-67. Page 461.
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of their relationship with their boss and with internal interpersonal issues rather than the
Ministry’s performance.” In contrast to the decentralizing, evaluative, task-oriented and
individualistic NPM, the authors find the following predisposition in African societies:
African societies find expression in organizations in rather authoritative,
paternalistic leadership styles and centralized hierarchical structures. The
customary dependency relationships that this entails are often
accompanied by a reluctance by mangers to make critical judgments of
individual performance.33
It takes a great deal of tunnel vision to believe that performance-based business-minded
Western-style reforms could achieve progress in such an environment. And yet the dominant
paradigm in the international development community for at least 20 years was NPM. More
generally, it is a fallacy to believe either that interventions built on diametrically opposed
cultural foundations could survive in a foreign cultural environment or that cultural foundations
can be feasibly reformed to fit a new set of cultural assumptions, if at all. Rather, what is
required is an examination of both the reform package to ensure that it is appropriate and feasible
to the cultural milieu of a democratizing country—which must itself be holistically and fully
understood. This must be coupled with a gestalt shift toward including cultural characteristics
not as a bemoaned afterthought in program implementation, but a limiting assumption at the
outset on the level of cost or feasibility.
VI. Reconceptualizing governance reform
The practical manifestation in governance reform of the above approach, which may appear
to be a horribly complex conflation of cultural realities, best practices, domestic priorities for
33 Jones, Ibid. Page 466.
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donor agencies and precedent is really rather simple. It is prioritization. Prioritization of civil
service reforms means disaggregating its component elements and evaluating each of them for
appropriateness and feasibility. This is the approach advocated by Harvard professor Merilee
Grindle, who champions “good enough governance” that focuses on providing the minimal,
rather than the optimal, conditions of governance.34 As was demonstrated in Ghana, attacking all
of the problems in one integrated package of civil service reform invites the exhaustion of the
whole process. Attempting to build the rule of law everywhere in the civil service, right now, is
not practical for many reasons, many of them cultural. In Grindle’s model, both context
(country-specific factors) and content (of the reforms) are important to program design and she
takes particular effort to accommodate what she describes as an increasing (and encouraging)
trend among development practitioners to “begin where the country is.”35 To be fair, this point is
not entirely lost on USAID, which notes among its strategic goals and priorities for governance
that “policy change is often multidirectional, fragmented, frequently interrupted, and
unpredictable.”36 On the other hand, much progress remains to be made: its strategic anti-
corruption plan contains only one (adversarial) mention of “culture”.37
The concept of good enough governance is far from perfect. It does not provide clear
guidance on which interventions should be chosen—only that such a choice should happen.38 It
requires patience, both in time, in demonstrating results, and in allowing some unscrupulous
practices that to temporarily continue so that others might be improved. It becomes difficult for
34 Grindle, Merilee S. "Good Enough Governance Revisited." Development Policy Review 25.5 (2007): 553-74. Page 554.
35 Grindle, Ibid. Page 561.36 Center for Democracy and Governance. “Policy Implementation: What USAID Has Learned.”
Washington: USAID. 2001.37 USAID. “USAID Anticorruption Strategy.” Washington. 2005. http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/democracy_and_governance/publications/pdfs/ac_strategy_final.pdf.38 Grindle, Ibid. Page 554.
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aid agencies to justify expenditure on governance if it is not disbursed rapidly with demonstrable
and politically expedient results.39 For that reason, we must seek a more thorough understanding
of why patience and perspective are required in this situation. Stepping back to consider more
broadly the mission of civil service reform in developing countries like Liberia, Douglass
North’s theories of the development of the modern state can provide some perspective to what
can be expected in democratizing African societies. If we are willing to consider governance in
reform in African states by beginning where they are, then we must investigate where they are
expected to be in terms of institutional development.
In North’s Violence and Social Orders, he describes a transition from a “limited access
order” characterized by personal patronage and dominated by the elites to an “open access order”
with functioning democratic institutions. In the process of transition, there are several stages
wherein the role of the elites changes and their power diminishes—stages that are natural and
slow-moving. Elites, agrees development scholar Richard Crook in a study of decentralization,
capture local power structures “facilitated by the desire to create and sustain power bases.”40
Together with the entrenched patronage networks and political resistance to transparent and
accountable institutions of governance that have frustrated civil service reform efforts, these
phenomena would be familiar to North. His theories expect elites to attempt to appropriate rents
(i.e., engage in corrupt practices in the civil service) and distribute them throughout patronage
networks (neopatrimonialism). By the same token, attempts to force an open access order (good
governance) will generate resistance from elites and cause development projects to fail. 41 As
39 Lecture by Professor Andrew Natsios, Georgetown University. March 1st, 2010.40 Crook, Richard. “Decentralization and Poverty Reduction in Africa.” Public Administration and
Development. 28 (2003): 77-88. Page 77.41 North, Douglass, et. al. “Limited Access Orders in the Developing World: A New Approach to
the Problems of Development.” Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank. Policy Research Working Paper 4359. November 2007.
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North says, “the rule of law cannot emerge by fiat,” neither in Ancient Rome nor Liberia.42
North’s analyses lend some theoretical credence to a “good enough governance” perspective that
is based on incremental and context-specific progress, tempered by feasibility. North confirms
that the institutional factors at play in limited access orders (as most democratizing states in
Africa are) necessitate a healthy regard for the probable reactions of the elites and the stages of
progress through which all societies must progress to reach the open access order that is the goal
of governance reform.
VII. What can Liberia learn from civil service reform efforts?
We must be cautioned by Grindle’s insistence that “there are no magic bullets, no easy
answers, and no obvious shortcuts towards conditions of governance that can result in faster and
more effective development” in recommending a course of policymaking to countries like
Liberia. At the same time, given the opportunity to approach civil service reform with a new
approach, it is evident that their approach ought to look very different from those that other
countries have experienced. Donors who need to back Western theories of public administration
to justify their expenditure back home cannot wrest control of the process away from Liberians
themselves. Neither can any program be designed that creates dissonance between the cultural
assumptions that underlie it and the cultural foundations of the communities it serves.
Accompanying a focus on structures and policies must be one on the civil servants themselves—
not only their pay, but their conceptualization of their relationships within the organization and a
healthy appreciation for their capabilities. Campaigns to eliminate patronage and corruption
must be mindful of the deep-seated historical and social realities that spawn such behaviors and
reformers must take care not to alienate the civil service from entire reform process through 42 North, Douglass, et. al. Violence and Social Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2009. Page 48.
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exuberance. Some changes will have to wait. Some changes will not happen. All changes will
be slow. This is an unsexy and unrewarding reality that requires a heretofore absent humility,
patience, and perspective on the part of civil service reformers worldwide.
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