Public bureaucracy
Improving services to an increasingly aware and expectant public
In the last article (27/01/24), we highlighted key developments that inexorably led to a need for reviewing the manner in which the public sector was being administered. From 1945 (end of WWII) to the 1970s (debt crisis and global recession), public bureaucracies had kept growing to the extent that they were being seen as cumbersome and bloated by researchers and analysts. There were a number of reasons for this. One, the public bureaucracy was expected to provide services in almost all sectors of the economy. Two, the welfare portion of the national budget (health, education, social welfare, etc.) was blighted with the economic phenomenon of “downward rigidity” — they could move in only one direction, upwards. Three, the public bureaucracy was widely being used in ever-expanding development programs that were government-led. And four, the public bureaucracy was expected to absorb masses of graduates to alleviate unemployment.
The path to public sector reforms
WE discussed in some detail why and how this came about in two earlier articles. Questions began to arise about the size and effectiveness of the government bureaucracy. The bottom line was that, given the financial constraints being faced, too much of the national budget was being absorbed by the public bureaucracy without this being translated into improved services to an increasingly aware and expectant public. This, of course, was directly linked to improvements in public access to information largely through improvements in technology. In other words, economies were faced with an acute need to move from administering to managing their public services. There is a marked difference between administration and management and the pendulum had shifted towards management just as it had preferred administration earlier. Let’s look at the difference between the two.
Administration vs management
The administrative model has its grounding in the classical school of management. This school of thought has its bases in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It designs management focused on efficiency around a hierarchy with specialised roles for workers who are primarily motivated by physical and economic needs. The bureaucratic model is one of the key contributors to this school of thought. And it is the bureaucratic model that evolved into the public administration model in the early 1900s. This is the model that prevailed around the globe and one of its key weaknesses was seen in its rigidity and its inability to change with changes in the environment. The biggest complaint was that it was relatively unresponsive to the changing demands of the public that it was primarily mandated to serve. Management, on the other hand, was seen as an antithesis to this. So just what were the key features of the public administration model that rendered it inappropriate among the changes seen in the 1960s and ‘70s?
The key features of public administration include rationality, hierarchy, expertise, rules-based decisions, formalisation and specialisation. Rationality calls for public officials to be objective and unbiased in their decision making. This appeared to work when civil servants were seen and respected as an elite group of officials. They also seemed to operate in a “black box” where subjective concerns could not enter and their decisions remained curtained off from the public eye. Much of this had changed with time with increasing public insistence on rights and transparency and accountability. We saw the same here in Fiji as by the 1980s disaffected groups had begun to demand access to information and the public bureaucracy came under intense political scrutiny.
The hierarchical structure of the public service worked on the premise that civil servants saw their profession as a vocation. It was something that they were internally driven to choose for a lifetime. Thus, the longer one stayed in the service, the higher they moved up the ladder of seniority. Each level on the hierarchy had its linked roles, responsibilities and powers. And since the whole organisation and its decision making processes were heavily rules-based, expertise was closely linked to conversance with these myriad rules, regulations and procedures. This meant that civil servants got promoted on their conversance with these rules and their length of service. This appeared to trivialise or ignore the performance concerns of management. Instances were being cited of exemplary performers being overlooked because they did not have the necessary length of service.
The prevalence of extensive rules, regulations and procedures meant that employee behaviour was controlled within formalised structures. Decision making was heavily constrained and the civil servant could easily be hobbled if any requirement in the decision process, no matter how trivial, was missing. Moreover, because of the hierarchical structure of the organisation and consequently the hierarchical nature of the decision making process, decisions had to go “up” the ladder for formalisation. This meant that an unnecessarily large number of personnel were involved, and the decision had to go through an unnecessarily long chain of command. In the process, it was not uncommon for decisions to be delayed inordinately or forgotten entirely. After all, what happened in the “black’ box” was outside the public domain. It was inside the supposedly rational, efficient and secretive civil service.
I remember how my father applied for a second telephone in our settlement in 1970. That was during the Post and Telecom days. He had travelled to Suva to sell his yaqona and lodged the application at the central office. Six months later, nothing had happened despite expensive calls to Suva where some official, sometimes politely and sometimes impolitely, said that the application was “in process”. A second trip was made to Suva at the end of 1970 and again my father trudged to the main office only to be told that the application was nowhere to be seen. He then made another application and returned to Vuna in Taveuni with high hopes. These hopes dissipated with time as the whole process was repeated in 1971. The expectation then moved to 1972 as a family member who knew someone at P&T told my father that a team would definitely get the job done “soon”.
Then Hurricane Bebe struck Fiji in October 1972. It was the worst tropical cyclone to impact both Fiji and Tuvalu since 1952. The destruction was beyond belief with 19 deaths in Fiji and six in Tuvalu. I remember how we ran around picking up fish off the main road in front of the Vatuwiri Wharf the morning after the cyclone passed. I am talking about Hurricane Bebe here because a P&T team flew over from Suva to reinstall damaged and fallen telephone lines on the island. You see at that time, telephone lines were hooked onto coconut trees. I think the term “coconut wireless” has its origins there. These coconut trees that acted as “P&T posts” had been devastated by the cyclone and the telephone lines had fallen with the trees.
So, when the P&T team arrived, they were welcomed as stars among others. In our end of the island, they were hosted in our village and their leader became a good friend of my father’s. I remember seeing them downing whiskies together. When the team left the island, my father’s P&T friend promised to look into the long-lodged and long-delayed phone application. Not long afterwards, the much-awaited phone was installed. This is how the bureaucratic model delayed and stymied decision making that, in turn, hobbled service delivery at the time. The public administration model clearly needed a re-look. When I think back now, I wonder whether it was that friendship between my father and that P&T technician or was it divine intervention in the form of Hurricane Bebe, that finally prodded the government bureaucracy to install our phone at long last.