Transforming Indonesia's civil service

By Raphael Lengesa Nombo

YOGYAKARTA (JP): The 1980s and 1990s are viewed as very challenging and meaningful decades for civil service reform in most developing countries. The global wind of change that questioned the growth of public bureaucracies, coupled with increasing inefficiency and loss of confidence in the civil service hitherto, posed a serious challenge to different governments to quest for a meaningful civil service reform, the cornerstone for building effective governments.

For example, the economic crisis which was experienced by the government of Indonesia in the early 1980s had a very significant implication in the reformation of state administration.

One important aim of civil service reform is to contribute to the change, development and dissemination of promising management approaches in order to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity in the public sector's productivity.

There are many specific variables in the bureaucracy which link its relationship to individual behavior and how their interactions may influence reform within the civil service.

First, technological advances can pressure civil services to change their structures, procedures, goals and methods of operation. Second, increasing costs and scarcity of resources in the bureaucracy are imperative variables, which can also influence reform.

Third, higher levels of education and training in the labor market may also influence change in the civil service. Fourth, new organizational strategies and public servants' (employees) attitudes and behavior may also count as contributing factors of civil service reform.

To deal with change, bureaucracy, once it realizes that it faces these challenges, uses two major ways to justify the need for reform. First, the bureaucracy may react to the signs that change is needed, making piecemeal modifications on dealing with particular problems as they arise.

Second, the civil service may develop a program of planned change, making significant investments in time and other resources to alter the ways on how the bureaucracy may operate. All these indicators are very important to understand because in one way or another they are related to individual behavior, which may ultimately influence change in the civil service system.

Despite realizing all these conditions, however, in developing countries, the bureaucratic reform process has not always been a smooth deal. The question is whether our bureaucrats are ready for and committed to civil service reform. Analysts argue that the meaning of reform has been muddled (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 13) by technocrats.

In developing countries, the greatest threat to bureaucratic reform sometimes comes from the status quo group, which resists change for its own reasons.

In the process of achieving reform, resistance to change has originated from higher-ranking public officials who are uncertain of their future managerial posts and their jobs. Occasionally, public servants have feared becoming victims of downsizing and retrenchment. Why is this so? First, uncertainty about the causes and effects of change have set bureaucrats into stages of fearing reform.

Second, it is feared sometimes that reform may disrupt existing relations and patterns of behavior, like the institutionalized corruption, collusion and nepotism. Third, reform is suspected to threaten an individual's status and financial rewards.

Fourth, awareness of weaknesses in the proposed change, that is, doubts regarding the technical feasibility of the proposed reform. Nonetheless, the influence of a group of norms and values that oppose change makes bureaucrats fear reform.

Furthermore, the threat of having to retrain and acquire new skills in order to cope with altered working methods is an important consideration. Here, the argument which is advanced by the technocrats is based on lack of financial resources in the implementation of reform.

Feelings of personal inadequacy against new technologies, like fear of not being able to understand a newly installed computer system, have undermined reform efforts.

In developing countries, civil services have two competing goals. First, task performance/service delivery and second, political incorporation. The first is the subject of civil service reform, but is often the secondary goal.

The second is often the primary goal, that is, incorporating a politically selected group as a means of political control, on terms which do not give most of them a say in government policies but does give them a subordinate place in the hierarchies of political control. Political incorporation through patronage is an effective control tool used by political elites since jobs are limited and as a result, there is pressure by extended family members, ethnic affiliates, school mates and so forth.

Central features of such civil services include solidarity, the relative insignificance of specialized expert knowledge to bureaucratic roles, important rules neither transparent nor codified, a forgiving attitude to inefficiency and poor performance of assigned tasks and idiosyncratic bureaucratic careers.

Reforms such as downsizing and rightsizing not only threaten the career of civil servants in such settings but also threaten the system of political control and stability. These reforms also threaten the well-being of the network of kin, etc., supported by the job holders.

Clay Wescott (1996) argues that bureaucrats in such settings may take advantage of reform programs (like downsizing) to get rid of political opponents and to refill the positions with relatives and ethnic cohorts.

This shortcoming, which is common and widely debated in the bureaucratic circle undermines the civil service reform agenda in most developing countries. Gerald E. Caiden (1982) attributes that vested interests have managed to block administrative reform and in this case, public officials have not acted with vigor or boldness to change the prevailing arrangements of the civil service.

This pattern to fail achieving public administration reform is contributed to by these factors. First, the sheer volume of public business in the administrative state makes it virtually impossible for public leaders to deal with more than a small fraction with the advent of big government.

When government was smaller, it was possible for bureaucrats to know much more of what was going on. Second, the administrative role of the bureaucrats has been transformed from being concerned mainly with details of policy implementation to responsibility for policy initiation and selection, the management of huge, complicated organizations and the personification of the government to the governed. Technocrats have assumed heavy obligations and bear great responsibility, which reinforces their traditional cautionary attitudes.

Third, civil services that have been in existence for an appreciable period of time are no longer instrumental but institutional. Bureaucracies are not entirely at the mercy of their external environment for they can control some aspects of it; certainly they can create and manipulate their own clientele just as international organizations have reamed to do. In contrary, bureaucracies have developed independent power. They exploit external allies and make alliances with the vested interests they serve.

Fourth, bureaucracies have no competitors, no rivals, no private counterparts capable of replacing them. Civil services have a virtual monopoly of talent, expertise, experience and knowledge in their jurisdiction. Bureaucracies are the only professionals. Anyone outside who wants to be considered an expert has to depend on their willingness to supply the requisite information and their accreditation.

Furthermore, the subjects of civil service reforms are large- scale organizations which tend to be rigid, conservative, custom bound and slow moving. The more people that have to be won over, the harder it is to convince them all. Last, civil service reform is much harder than it used to be. There are few easy, obvious targets. Past reforms have dealt with the grosser form of mal administrations. Wrong doings, as far as anyone can tell, are nowhere heard to be as bad as they once were. Consequently, much of the passion has gone out of the issue.

Nevertheless, the climax of reform failures in developing nations is clearly explained by a lack of finance and limited budget resources. The editorial comment in the Post of June 17 correctly noted: "With limited budget resources and huge servicing burden imposed by about US$75 billion in foreign debts (treasury bonds), the new government will face major hurdles to meaningful civil service reform, the cornerstone for building good governance."

These shortcomings have made most governments in developing countries not to be taken serious by the public as committed to the Civil Service reform agenda.

The writer is currently a Postgraduate student in Public Administration Program at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. He is a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in Tanzania.