A fundamental characteristic of civil services throughout the world is that they tend to find their remits expanding over time into new areas of responsibility. This necessarily entails the growth in the size of a national civil service and its associated, wider public sector.
It is also an internationally recognised phenomenon that, especially at times of financial constraint, the political administration of a given country will wish to reduce the cost of the civil service and public sector as a whole, to reduce the workforce employed in this sector, and to reduce the scope of activity in which it is engaged.
Various approaches are taken to do this, including attempts to increase productivity to improve performance, privatisation and public-private partnerships, minor (and often counter-productive) changes to the machinery of government, and percentage reductions in departmental budgets.
However, it is very unusual for an administration to approach this subject in a coherent, strategic and comprehensive manner. This entails examining the necessary and desirable scope and range of public sector activity in which a given country’s civil service should be engaging, which departmental activities are actually necessary, and working from there to establish how many people are required to carry out these tasks and functions to optimum effect. From there it is possible to right-size a civil service department, even if this means that many of the activities which it has traditionally undertaken are no longer carried out at all.
This 7th Annual International Public Administration Reform Symposium will look in detail at these important issues, shining a constructive and informative light on this approach which holds the key to successful administrative reform.