Reform in bureaucracy

Photo: jens bonnke

The bureaucracy is an agent for the fulfilment of the policies of the government. Rigid neutrality and rigorous impartiality regarding political issues are the basis of official conduct. Democratic objectives would be impossible to attain in modern society without a bureaucratic organisation to implement them.
Bureaucratisation usually concentrates power in a few men and curtails the freedom of the individual, which is essential for democracy. Bureaucracy endangers democratic freedom but at the same time it serves important functions in a democratic society, which must not be ignored. Whatever the present state of administration, it seems clear that the art of administration implies democracy, which must be built on understanding of hierarchy as the structure of responsibility. The bureaucracy is an instrument to carryout public will, and this is expressed by parliament in the form of law.
The principles of Weberian bureaucracy seem to be in use in the Bangladesh bureaucracy. Our bureaucratic institutions are centralised and hierarchical, they are professional and impersonal, and the staff is chosen on the basis of examinations. These principles might have worked well in Weber's day when the tasks were relatively simple and straightforward. But the world has changed rapidly: the situation is characterised by technological revolution, global economic competition, free markets, educated workforces, demanding customers and severe fiscal constraints.
Bureaucracy has become too slow, too unresponsive and too incapable of changing or innovating. The disharmony between traditional bureaucracy and a changing world more or less causes the poor performance of government bureaucrats, who are biased, apathetic or unmotivated to carry out their tasks and responsibilities.
We can identify three kinds of problems with Bangladesh's bureaucracy. First, Transparency International reports indicate that Bangladesh is among the most corrupt countries in the world. The performance of bureaucracy in our society is ranked the world's worst, along with those of India and Vietnam.
Second, there are problems with the overlapping structure of bureaucracy, vague divisions between government functions and citizen obligations, and unclear political process of policy formulation. Third, there are problems with human resources quality. About 56% of public employees are educated up to intermediate level, 18% have Bachelor degree, while only 19% are university graduates. The main problem is low public service performance and excessive service cost.
Apart from the corruption issue, there are problems with the institutions and management of bureaucracy. Bureaucracies in both central and local governments are now getting bigger. In such conditions, bureaucracy become inflexible and slow in anticipating emerging problems. The increase of bureaucracies, in most cases, happens because the focus of institution formation is on the institutional framework, neglecting the number and qualifications of personnel, systems of decision making, systems of institutional communication and the span of control. Such an institutional structure tends to narrow the choice of strategies or, as the well-known adage puts it, strategy follows structure.
The management of public bureaucracy also faces several problems like (i) unclear planning of work and assignments (ii) inappropriate procedures and assignments (iii) poor enforcement of reward and punishment system, and (iv) lack of transparency in bureaucratic work performance, which causes insufficient feedback for work improvement. The neutrality of the bureaucracy is threatened because of the pressure of political leaders. This situation contributes to the unfairness and poor distribution of public service, which tends to fertilise the practices of corruption, collusion and nepotism.
Reform should be carried out to improve the performance of the bureaucracy. Reform is also needed to regain the people's trust in government, which has been decreasing due to the multidimensional crises. Reforming the public service institution means restructuring its components. This includes aspects of service policy and optimisation, operational cooperation, work system and procedures and delegation of authority. The actions to be taken including following:
Reformulating the definition of public service as an institution, including its vision, mission, strategy, goal and objectives as well as standard operating procedure;
Auditing the public service, at both the central and the local levels to find out the intensity of institutional needs regarding the main tasks and functions of public service;
Targeting public service orientation to customer needs by developing a customer satisfaction index;
-Reformulating the systems of personnel recruitment and promotions and layoffs in accordance with employees' competence and work performance;
-Presenting rewards to the best performing employees and enforcing appropriate punishment to those who consistently show bad working behaviour;
-Formulating a system of performance measurement and empowering the competent employees so that they are able to bring creativity and innovation;
-Improving employee prosperity and integrity, specially building attitudes and behaviour oriented to fulfilling the public needs;
-Improving employee competence and professionalism through appropriate training programmes;
-Empowering society through cooperatives and NGOs so that the implementation of public service is more competitive, the performance improves and customers may choose better public service as they like;
-Developing resistance against corruption, collusion and nepotism that may ruin a bureaucrat's career;
-Developing integrity in the work and institutions through commitment and cooperation building among public service employees.
Since reform of the bureaucracy is complicated and massive it should be carried out incrementally, following well-planned steps. All governance components should be involved to reach the goal, as it is very crucial both to improve the performance of public service and to regain the decreasing trust of people in government due to the unending multi-dimensional crises.
Poverty is a historical phenomenon, and only if economic development reaches an advanced level can it ultimately be eliminated. Nevertheless, even in rich countries like US, fighting poverty is still a significant issue. Public administration shoulders the responsibilities of redistributing social wealth through a number of means, such as tax policy, diverse welfare programmes and other regulatory policies.
Bureaucracy has a large role to play in facilitating economic growth as well as ensuring social equity. The success of democracy and implementation of development programmes largely depend on the public personnel/bureaucratic organisations engaged in building the future of the country. The administrative structure as well as organisation has to be efficient, effective, dynamic, innovative and forward-looking in character. They have to be objective, fair and just on the one hand, and be within the highest standards of integrity and honesty on the other.
The writer is Joint Chief, (Rtd), Planning Commission. Email: [email protected]