New directions for public service reform in developing countries
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Author | Willy McCourt |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1833 |
RESEARCH ARTICLE
New directions for public service reform in developing
countries
Willy McCourt
University of Manchester, UK
Correspondence
W. McCourt, Institute for Development Policy
and Management, University of Manchester,
58 Cranfield Road, London SE4 1UG, UK.
Email: willy.mccourt@manchester.ac.uk
Summary
This paper argues that recent developments in practice and theory provide a more
promising basis for public service reform in developing countries than we have had
since at least the turn of the century. There have been significant instances of
large‐scale reform success, such as Nepal's Public Service Commission and Malaysia's
delivery unit, Pemandu, and also “pockets of effectiveness”in individual agencies in
many countries. They contribute to a more fruitful and diverse repertoire of reform
approaches than generally realized. Policymakers can draw on all those instances
and types of reform, together with relevant rich country experiences, as they
improvise and tailor responses to their always unique reform problems. Proceeding
in this way helps reformers to expand the “reform space”available within the political
economy. Donors can help reformers if they facilitate reform in the spirit of the Busan
Partnership rather than impose their preferred models. In short, the new direction
which this paper identifies can be stated as creative problem solving by local actors
facilitated by sympathetic donors, building on examples of reform success and drawing
on a repertoire of poor and rich country reform approaches.
KEYWORDS
aid effectiveness,governance, public management, public service reform
1|INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC SERVICE
REFORM IN “MAINSTREAM”DEVELOPING
COUNTRIES
1.1 |Promising signs?
This paper argues that we are at a promising moment in the history of
public service reform. Only a few years ago, McCourt and Gulrajani
(2010) painted a discouraging picture. They were able to identify
few important contributions to theory and practice in the first decade
of the new century, apart from contributions in the 2000s to our
knowledge of its political underpinnings, which, although important
(we shall discuss them), often made reform seem even more difficult
than we already thought it was. They also took stock of the World
Bank's negative evaluations of the very extensive programmes, which
it has sponsored over the 15 years up to the late 2000s (World Bank,
1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2008). This paper, however, reviews recent
initiatives that have opened up new prospects.
In the first half of this paper, therefore, we look at initiatives to
improve access to and delivery of public services, in terms of their
equity, or quality, or both, in what we might call “mainstream”devel-
oping countries, that is, countries in the low‐or middle‐income cat-
egories that are exempt from the fundamental problems of conflict
or stability that at the time of writing afflicted countries such as
Afghanistan and Democratic Republic of the Congo. Such states
have the basic apparatus of a functioning state—schools, clinics,
agriculture services, and central support services such as a Ministry
of Finance—but it is an apparatus that tends to function inefficiently
or inequitably or both.
In the second half of the paper, we turn from empirical practice to
theory, reviewing some new understandings of how successful
reforms can be facilitated before suggesting, finally, what all these
Received: 6 January 2017 Revised: 26 March 2018 Accepted: 29 June 2018
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1833
120 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin Dev. 2018;38:120–129.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad
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