Abstract
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Drawing partly on their own direct experience as consultants in a variety of countries (e.g. Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Montenegro, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), and partly on recent assessments made by international donor agencies themselves, the authors argue that technical assistance for public administration reform in the countries of “transition” critically lacks coherent vision and purpose. This makes it impossible to evaluate effectively the results of assistance, or revise objectives and methods on the basis of real experience. To support their thesis, the authors point to the paradox that those working as consultants in the field are obliged to provide technical advice to their clients in state administrations based on principles and methodologies which are not in practice observed by the funding organisations themselves. Moreover, few of the assessments of PAR include participation by those who live in the region and experience on a daily basis the results of such a contradiction.
The paper examines in particular three mainstream elements of public administration reform: “decentralisation” and local government; development of a merit-based, neutral civil service; re-structuring” of the machinery of central government, on the basis of functional analysis and review. The authors conclude that, in each of these three aspects, the external and internal reformers have usually been conversing in concepts and meanings that are differently understood on either side. This make nonsense of the results-based, and mechanistic, indicators used to monitor and evaluate performance of funded projects and programmes. It also means that aid programmes for PAR are mainly supply-driven and that the beneficiaries are reduced to an essentially passive and permissive role (often also rent-seeking).
In fact, the implementation of public administration reform programmes is typically driven by a divided, and ultimately incompatible, set of intentions and expectations, Three main alternative tendencies are thus defined and analysed: economic liberalism, political liberalism and pragmatism/realism. These three approaches have a similar tolerance of mechanical, quantitative methods of managing assistance programmes. But they all exclude two elements which are vital to public administration reform as a process of re-building state institutions, and restoring a healthy relationship between state and society, where these have been as seriously damaged as in the CEE/CIS region: (1) a sense of public administration as a professional activity imbued with its own standards, ethics and corporate spirit as distinct from a purely technical practice of management assimilated with business management in the private sector; and (2) an adequate appreciation of what are the real needs, aspirations, and challenges facing the public sectors of transition countries today and what recipients should reasonably expect from consultants.
An approach that was able sufficiently to restore both these elements would need to deploy the skills of anthropology, sociology and political science, and not only those of applied economics and management. The paper concludes by proposing that NISPACEE take an initiative to bring together from its members a small, suitably representative ‘think-tank’ composed partly of academics and partly of practitioners, to consider the arguments set out in this paper, and to design a new conceptual and methodological map to guide both donors and recipients in future.
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