Role For The New Centre

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

A new Global Centre for Public Service Excellence has been set up at Singapore with the collaboration of UNDP and the Government of Singapore. The Centre will be dedicated to policy, learning, and knowledge sharing on cutting edge research and practice in public services management and reform. The Global Centre will draw on the respective strengths of the two partners and strive to create a Centre of excellence in research and a convening hub on the theme of public services. Its goal of galvanising public service capacities for excellence can at best be indirectly achieved through dissemination of relevant knowledge to stakeholders and networking with appropriate national advocacy institutions. Obviously the Centre has to take a lead role in research and generating knowledge so that it could act as a convening hub on the theme of public services, and as an advocacy platform towards influencing senior public servants in other countries responsible for policy formulation and its implementation.

As already discussed, in the area of civil service reform, Governments face many critical challenges. They must enhance the productivity of the civil service and make certain that each employee is performing socially relevant tasks. They must ensure the long-term affordability of the civil service, and must enforce procedures for rewarding and promoting merit, disciplining malfunction and misconduct, to strengthen accountability and performance quality. It has become necessary to reshape the bureaucracy so that it performs its core public functions and develop new ways of ensuring that critical economic and social services are provided directly or indirectly. A new work culture will have to be evolved at all levels of the staff. Innovation and performance should be encouraged and rewarded and steps should be taken to ensure effective supervision and control over the functionaries. To deal with the newer challenges, civil servants also need to continuously update themselves. They have to continuously expand their horizons through learning and training. Only this would equip them to keep pace with the changing times.

The Centre should develop a virtual portal where experiences of public service practitioners can be shared with intellectuals and academics. It should provide space for public service practitioners to reflect on their practices, through discussion forums, and will make available to a wider audience the work being done by individual public servants to bring about change in their respective sectors. As they reflect upon their own and the experience of others, organisational learning would be facilitated.

The work plan for the new Centre needs to be drawn up keeping in view the requirement of the developing nations. While the detailed plan for achieving civil service reforms has to be prepared by each country, the new Centre could provide best practices by researching on themes that would necessarily be part of any national plan. In addition to subjects already discussed in the first part, the proposed research plan for the Centre may also include Public Private Partnerships, use of IT and developing a good MIS, which are in the nature of low-hanging fruits, and are being adapted by many developing countries, with far reaching impact on public service delivery.

Partnerships and research agenda

As a leading research hub, the Centre should draw upon the best quality material emanating from the various think tanks, universities, and from on-going policy practice in Singapore and other countries, so that it helps in enhancing UNDP’s existing knowledge and research capability. The Centre should bring together diverse experiences of many countries for promoting South-South collaboration, by sharing, exchanging and co-creating such knowledge so as to catalyze policy thinking on public service capacity for sustainable development. Best practices tried in low and middle income countries would also be useful for the richer nations. For instance, PROGRESA, the system of cash transfers for poor households pioneered in Mexico, is now being given a trial run in New York [1] .

Such studies should be widely disseminated for advocacy. It will also build up public opinion in favour of reforms. Without adequate publicity acceptability of civil service reforms by the people cannot be assumed, even when intended reforms will benefit those who need them most.

Some of the subjects on which the Centre should prepare policy and analytical papers so as to be useful to other countries are discussed below.

Public-People partnerships (PPP) and Outsourcing

Many countries are today setting up hybrid institutions [2] to undertake commercial activities that are somewhere in between totally state controlled (such as banks and industries in China) and fully privatized (such as in USA). In such parastatals ownership and management may be shared between the state and private sector. Such public-private partnership (PPP) takes different shapes, such as provision of land and concessional tax regime in SEZs (Special Economic Zones), total transfer of responsibility to private sector entities for providing essential services such as water and power in cities but setting up simultaneously a Regulator for deciding tariff, etc.

Some of the parastatals such as BBC in UK, Temasek Holdings Ltd in Singapore (a government-owned investment company), and Railways in India are wholly owned and controlled by government, but given considerable autonomy, and many are able to compete with the private sector. However lack of public scrutiny may sometimes impact on their accountability and may inhibit inclusive growth.

PPPs are quite popular in infrastructure projects where government commits to make in-kind or financial contributions to the project, whether through subsidies or guarantees, and the private partner builds, maintains, and operates the assets in exchange for some combination of user fees [3] .

Many interesting innovations in governance and partnerships between the public and private sectors are coming from the developing countries. Manila Water Reforms deserve special mention because the city was infamous for its outdated, inefficient water system. The privatization of Manila’s Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, on which IFC (International Finance Corporation) was lead advisor, fundamentally changed the sector. The privatization required the transfer of full operational and investment responsibilities to the private operators, and an independent regulatory unit was established in 1997 to monitor and enforce the concession agreements [4] .

In the past three decades several states in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Eastern Caribbean and in Europe (and other states as well) have used forms of outsourcing, usually to regional organizations, as a means to reduce the cost and increase the quality of some public services. In Sub-Saharan Africa: the Banque des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale,1 (BEAC) and the Banque Centrale des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest,2 (BCEAO), established in the 1960s have been pioneer multi-country central banks worldwide. Multi-country security agreements, as in the African Union (AU) or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), have been increasingly used to prevent or quench local conflicts. These agreements allow the deployment of multinational troops to help stabilize a potentially volatile situation. The rationale underlying a government decision to subcontract provision of some public services to a regional organization is to access higher quality (and possibly lower cost) public services than could be produced domestically. In that respect, contracting out a public service is not radically different from importing private goods and services, when producing these goods domestically is more expensive than purchasing them in the rest of the world [5] .

The role of private sector in providing low cost sanitation and potable water can be quite significant and needs to be explored. Currently, in many cities, a water and sanitation unit is generally operated as a traditional public sector, line department. In this context, reform options may include converting the water and sanitation department into a corporate utility operated under an independent board with a legally binding performance management contract between the city and the utility. In this case, the city remains the owner and policy maker but service provision is now in the hands of a corporate provider at arms length from the policy maker. Another option would be to bring in a private operator to manage the utility, further strengthening the arms length relationship between the policy maker and provider. In the solid waste sector, to take another example, cities may institutionally separate the operations of collection, transfer and landfill into different entities bringing private sector participation in where appropriate in the chain. If warranted by the economies of scale, a cluster of cities may jointly own and manage a common landfill operated by a corporate utility. Again, the regulatory function could be passed onto the State. These are examples of how the roles of policy making, provider and regulator can be separated.

One of the areas where public-private partnerships can be introduced is in the running of care homes. Asking government servants to run such homes is expensive (as salary and pension burden in government may be higher in many countries such as India than what the civil society pays to corresponding levels), and they lack the skills and motivation to provide care to the elderly or the disabled. Transferring such homes to the NGOs is cost-effective, as well as will ensure better services. Some other areas where GO-NGO partnership can be effective in making administration citizen friendly are

Peoples’ participation in natural resource management

Community health and sanitation

Monitoring primary education

Village development schemes

Internationally, PPPs have demonstrated that sharing risks between private firms and the state can provide strong incentives for services to be delivered more effectively to users and, thereby, more efficiently for taxpayers. However, lessons learnt so far highlight the need for a robust governance framework, to ensure that PPPs provide value for money overall, are affordable in the long-term, and entail appropriate risk transfer. Otherwise, there is a risk that PPPs may be pursued because of short term fiscal constraints or ephemeral accounting reasons, with the consequent risk of exposing governments to unaffordable and perhaps unexpected long-term liabilities. This means that, on the one hand, PPPs are not seen as a mainstream route to infrastructure provision, and, on the other, PPPs are frequently applied inappropriately - early efforts to adopt PPPs for motorway projects in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland have not been successful in delivering results, and consequently tarnished the public perception of PPPs [6] .

The Centre may study different models and write papers on the comparative advantage and disadvantage of such arrangements. What are the conditions under which hybrid PPP arrangements lead to better public satisfaction?

E-Governance

As is well known, e-governance applications are now being widely used in the developing countries. This has made the citizen-state interface much easier, reducing transaction costs and public dissatisfaction. E-governance is less threatening to those in authority in contrast to some of the complex administrative reforms that have remained dormant in official reports. An e-governance application may look simple and limited in scope, yet it may have far reaching implications for the operating culture and performance of governments. E-governance is thus fast emerging as an important tool for achieving good governance especially with regard to improving efficiency, transparency and making interface with government user friendly.

Singapore is at the forefront in e-governance applications. It has used new technologies to streamline and speed up its interactions with, and services to, the public in almost all sectors of activity. It has also used IT in a big way in improving the internal management of its systems with respect to funds, personnel and assets (internal housekeeping). Based on this experience, the benefits of e-governance can be summarized as follows:

It improves government’s overall productivity.

It promotes greater transparency and public accountability.

It simplifies and speeds up the delivery of a wide range of public services.

It improves service quality and thus increases citizen satisfaction.

It aids dissemination of information and thus empowers people.

It can make government seamless, and integrate departmental activities.

However the full potential of e-governance can be realized only when several other reforms are undertaken. Governments must be willing to share information with the citizens. Access to government information may be a right in many countries, but, practically speaking, it is usually cumbersome and often not achievable. Most citizens have little knowledge about what information is held within government coffers, let alone how to find it. Finding information can be time-consuming, costly and frustrating. If more than one agency is involved, the citizen can become a pinball, bouncing from one source to another.

Application of ICT must be accompanied with elements of organisational transformation and change. It needs new mind-sets, culture and processes in government organisations. Therefore, of late, most e-governance efforts inherently include business process re-engineering, aimed at generating citizen-centric and citizen interactive systems [7] . In the absence of these reforms ICT can be quite frustrating for the citizens, as they lose face-to-face contact with public servants, and are bombarded with information that is of little use to them. There is a great deal of evidence to show that people are not happy with a faceless bureaucracy that is unable to meet accurately expectations of personalized services that recognize differences and uniqueness [8] .

Singapore’s success as a leading purveyor of effective E-Government is more than just enabling government services with technology. It also involves a monumental effort to reform the public service, which entails significant structural and operational changes. Over the last twenty years, the government’s progressive and meticulously crafted national ICT programmes have established a strong foundation to transform the public service, coupled with a holistic E-Government framework that addresses not only technology but also management, process, governance, and social and cultural issues to deliver accessible, integrated, and value adding e-services to its constituents. Other countries with poor governance will therefore not be able to take full advantage of technological possibilities that ICT offers. One can only hope that application of e-governance would slowly put pressure on governments to initiate other administrative reforms too that are necessary for efficient programme delivery.

Management Information Systems (MIS)

The Centre should study the prevalent MIS for important national programmes of various countries, as it impacts on the quality of programme delivery. In most developing countries field staff reports only on activities, they are not involved in impact assessment, or in qualitative monitoring. The concept of stakeholder monitoring is unknown. No indicators exist for assessing public participation or their awareness. Emphasis is laid only on the initial or current expenses. After five years, little is done or monitored. Secondly, when money has been allocated for a particular activity in a particular area, it is assumed that the work in question has been done, and that it was sufficient. This ignores the fact that either of the above assumptions could be wrong. The primary monitoring activities have to do with fiscal accountability. While it is necessary, it should not be allowed to overshadow the need for technical and resource monitoring and planning work accordingly. At present, there is great pressure on the field staff as a whole to account for funds utilized, but not in terms of longer-term results, because those are not monitored. Thus financial planning is divorced from physical planning.

Performance budgeting on the lines of Singapore and other developed countries has either not been introduced or is only on paper in many developing countries. Generally there is ex-ante rather than ex-post control of expenditure by line agencies through the institution of Financial Advisors or the Ministry of Finance. Thus the performance budgeting system for reporting of outputs and outcomes is divorced from financial reporting and budget preparation. Given departmental allocations, operational efficiency and effectiveness crucially requires accountability. This encompasses

fixing individual and collective responsibility for delivery of defined service outputs;

personnel policies linked to performance, with performance being measured by actual outputs in relation to prescribed service delivery standards and preset targets;

independent internal and external, financial and performance auditing with mechanisms for effective corrective or disciplinary action based on audit findings; and

"customer" satisfaction surveys.

Further, transparency in financial management requires

publication of programme performance reports, and

feedback mechanisms to elicit client feedback on the quality of services provided. Aside from internal and external auditing, the institutional framework for service delivery in the developing countries hardly meets these standards and sanctions linked to poor performance, or programme modifications based on client feedback are sporadic, at best.

The new Centre should prepare policy and research papers covering the above issues with the ultimate objective of promoting south-south partnerships in collaborative learning.

Structures of rewards and punishments

The Centre may like to study the prevailing incentive structure that motivates public servants to excel. In many countries there are no well-enforced norms and rules of work discipline, very few punishments for ineptitude or malfeasance, and there are strong disincentives to take bold, risky decisions. Howsoever we may criticize these constraints, but the hard reality is that little can be done to change them overnight. At the same time, it is possible to create some (perhaps symbolic to begin with) incentives for good performance within the system. Here, the magnitude of the reward or the severity of the penalty matters less than their certainty, swiftness and fair and uniform application. A rise in individual accountability must be accompanied by commensurate rewards and consequences for non-performance (on-the-job training, rather than penalties, may be the right response). The weight of evidence from all countries shows that the lack of credible consequences turns serious accountability reforms into bureaucratic formality.

Training

Should the new Centre be involved in organising training programmes for senior civil servants engaged in policy making in the developing countries? This is one issue that needs to be seriously considered. The other UNDP Centres at Oslo and Rio do not hold training sessions. However, international training programmes help the policy makers of a country to understand how governance has improved in a neighbouring country which faces similar constraints of political economy. It helps in the faculty of the Centre networking with senior government officials that is mutually beneficial. Apart from the subjects discussed above, the Centre should develop expertise in issues relating to accountability, programme delivery and evaluations, human resource management, and corruption.

In addition to running short-term training programmes (duration may vary from one to two weeks), the new Centre should also be able to offer long-term fellowships for middle-level policy makers from developing countries, for periods ranging from three months to one year, so that the fellowship holder may develop expertise in a variety of subjects relevant to his/her country and Ministry.

In not too distant future it may also consider developing partnerships with national training institutions with a view to develop their capacity and hold joint training programmes.

However, training should be seen as an integral part of personnel management, and should be linked to recruitment, career and promotional avenues, human resource development, and general environment of governmental functioning. Without improvement in these related sectors, the efficacy of training would be limited.

Dissemination strategy - The new Centre could also promote communication among local stakeholders, such as businessmen, bureaucrats, economists and donors, which will improve acceptability of technocratic solutions and ownership of reform programmes by them. These may be accompanied by strategies to understand and address obstacles to reform that will often rely on communication among networks within and outside of government, among civil society organizations, and between citizens in the public sphere [9] . This method of reaching out to political leaders, policy makers, and legislators may be effective in many democratic countries. Similarly such training programmes and networking may also help in gaining the support of public sector middle managers, who are often the strongest opponents of change, and then foster among them a stronger culture of public service.

Many studies [10] have shown that ‘successful implementation of public sector governance reform depends on high-level political commitment, strong technical capacity, and incremental approaches with the potential for cumulative impact over an extended time frame’. One needs to take into account the domestic conditions and work with reform-oriented politicians and bureaucrats with modest aims and build on incremental progress.

Some other subjects, such as Accountability, promoting peoples’ participation, and decentralization that should be essential part of the Centre’s research agenda have already been discussed in the first part of the paper.

Dealing with increasingly uncertain, and complex policy issues

Apart from long-term challenges such as national security, climate change and population that cut across traditional Ministry and agency boundaries, the Public Service will in future need to address more complex issues, such as the possibility of low-probability but high-impact events (known in the literature as "black swans"), like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and SARS epidemic. This suggests that it will not be possible for any government to correctly anticipate and prevent all major crises, all the time. Therefore, it is necessary for each country to go beyond its existing strengths in optimisation and efficiency, to develop capabilities to manage and respond to shocks and unforeseen events, and to enhance institutional resilience within the Public Service itself.

Given the importance of risk management skills and the ability to deal with unexpected events, the focus of public service reform should in addition to enhancing the performance and efficiency of the bureaucracy also be to develop an entrepreneurial and risk tolerant role. This would aim to prepare the Public Service to meet ‘the known and unknown challenges’ in the present and the future.

Recognising the need for greater policy coordination on complex issues, the government of Singapore has established national agencies headed by Permanent Secretaries and situated within the Prime Minister’s Office. Inter-Ministerial Committees have also been established to coordinate policies on cross-agency issues such as export controls, population ageing and sustainable development, drawing together representatives from a spectrum of relevant public sector agencies. However, there are still obstacles to be overcome as members of such committees continue to receive their mandates from their parent organisations, with their own traditional priorities.

Nevertheless, coordinated and synergistic whole-of-government policies and implementation will become ever more crucial to achieving complex national outcomes. The success of countries will depend not on the strength of any one aspect of public policy, but on the synergistic whole in concerted action. The challenges facing whole-of-government initiatives are not to be under-estimated. It is not merely a question of wanting to work differently. The design and functions of complex organizations like federal governments cannot change overnight. Parliamentary mandates, accountability measures, financial legislation, organizational culture and the political undercurrents are just a few of the variables that will determine the success of such initiatives. Moreover a reverse trend to sectoral approach is being witnessed in some areas where it is seen as providing better results, e.g. the anti-corruption machinery that needs to be kept away from the influence of other Ministries.

The new Centre may like to study how different countries have faced such situations, and what lessons can be drawn for building administrative capacity for addressing such unforeseen crises.

Summing up

To sum up, the Centre should aim to be a platform for public service practitioners from both the developing and developed world to be able to participate in generation, production and dissemination of knowledge based on experiences from the field, and where the practitioners and empirical researchers communicate their practical experiences and learnings. Envisioned to empower them for change through dissemination and by connecting civil servants working on similar themes from across the world, the Centre should act as an intermediary for knowledge on innovative practices.

The new Centre should therefore have a robust research agenda on themes that are not only being tried with success in some countries leading to excellence, but should also include new thoughts that are emerging in the literature. UNDP as well as many external donors are engaged in helping governments in improving public service performance. UNDP provides technical assistance on administrative reforms and governance to many countries. Its portfolio also includes decentralization and peoples’ participation. Hence the Centre should conduct systematic review and analysis of work being done in these sectors so that the capacity of UNDP's front-line staff to address these new challenges facing administration improves and their advice carries greater credibility.

In brief, the Centre should position itself as a think tank for germinating ideas, develop analytical frameworks and bring together public sector reform champions (intellectual, policy makers, and practitioners) to share their experiences and foster knowledge transfer and dissemination. It would create a bank of best practices, methodologies and tools in public service excellence both from the developed and developing world.