SUSS POL 353 Study Unit 3 Civil Service Systems in Southeast Asia

Features and Significance of the Public
Service

What is Bureaucracy

  • there are three ways to understand the term bureaucracy. It can be understood as
    • (i) a formal organisational setting replete with specialisation of functions, hierarchy, adherence to rules and impartiality;
    • (ii) a bevy of full-time professional staff (bureaucrats) who are recruited, managed and rewarded based on the basis of their service, professionalism and merit; and
    • (iii) a tool that translates the commands of elected political officials into public policy.
  • the bureaucracy is commonly understood as an arm of the state and is not prominently featured in the design of political regimes, which tend to concentrate more on the power dynamics between political actors and institutions

Bureaucratic Theory

Max Weber’s Ideal-Type Bureaucracy

  • Max Weber’s Ideal-type bureaucracy aims to “accomplish large-scale administrative tasks by systematically coordinating the work of many individuals”
  • Weber’s theory suggests that if a bureaucracy was indeed developed in the ideal form that Weber suggested, it would be the most rational form of organisation.
  • As such, it should be used as a model against which empirical examinations of bureaucracies are measured to understand how they have developed over time and assess how changes in the trends of public administration have affected how bureaucracies would function
  • Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy can also serve as a “helpful heuristic to analyse and understand misconduct in government” and highlight how “actual practices of bureaucracies fall short of ideals”

Robert Merton’s Bureaucratic Structure and Personality

  • the imperfections of bureaucracy - He argued that strict adherence to rules results in
    • goal displacement,
    • produces rigidity,
    • bureaucratic red tape and
    • bureaucratic inertia.
  • The bureaucrat himself displays “trained incapacity” (i.e. trained to think and act in a rigi/specific way) that results in the training and skills that the bureaucrat has accrued eventually prevent him from functioning optimally as it results in “inappropriate responses (even) under changed conditions”
  • Merton also explained that the reliance and adherence to regulations discourage bureaucrats from understanding what are their true motivations of delivering public goods and services effectively and efficiently to citizens and they are unable to adapt if special circumstances arise in the course of their duties.
  • Apart from delays, civil servants also will not be motivated to engage in policy entrepreneurship or innovation, eventually leading to bureaucratic pathology and dysfunction

An Overview of Civil Services in Southeast Asia with Selected Case Studies

  • In Southeast Asia, it would not be inaccurate to conclude that the “civil service system is considered the core of public administration and a critical determining factor in its quality.
  • Recognising this, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a declaration at the 30th ASEAN Summit in 2017, which recognises the “role of the civil service as a catalyst for achieving the ASEAN Community Vision 2025”
  • examining the public administration structures and civil service systems in Southeast Asian countries, we can understand that civil service systems are influenced by a myriad of factors including historical trajectories, colonial legacies, levels of development and so on

Colonial Legacies of Civil Service Systems in Southeast Asia

  • The colonial bureaucratic models were premised on the formal principles of the original Western bureaucratic models;
    .
    • Colonial legacies: as the state developed and gained independence, some of these structures and principles, especially those relating to Weberian bureaucracy, were retained, while newer practices reflected the endogenous political culture and traditions of the specific Southeast Asian country
      .
    • Exlpoitative nature: colonial legacies are usually depicted in nationalist terms, where the colonial administrators are seen as creating governance structures simply to “extract value” and exploit the territories they oversaw with the intent of profit or specific self-serving agendas, rather than to develop these countries

Selected Case studies of Civil Service Systems in Southeast Asia: Cambodia and Lao PDR

  • Organisational obstacles: developing countries, particularly those with troubled histories, face several obstacles in organising the civil service system, public service delivery and reform efforts
    • Challenges may include
      • a lack of political will,
      • pervasive patron-client systems,
      • weak institutions, lack of funding,
      • and lack of technical and administrative capacities
  • Gov effectiveness: governments can only be effective and progress if the people who execute the will of the government - the civil servants - are motivated, equipped with the right skills and attitude and have the ability to implement and deliver public services
    • countries attempting to progress economically, socially, politically and democratically will flail without responsible public administrators

Issues relating to Civil Service Personnel

Recruitment and Retention of Civil Servants

  • a key priority: capacities of the bureaucracy to carry out administrative functions, implement policies and ensure these efforts are successful
  • Importance of right talents: Thus in meeting these key priority, talent acquisition is fundamental

Recruitment of Civil Servants

  • Merit-based recruitment: I.e. technocrats (Experience/Intelectual credentials as opposed to Racial/cultural bias)
  • Diversity: Widens pools of candidates
  • Independent of political patronage

Merit-based recruitment

Attracting Potential Civil Service Candidates

Education and Training

Job Placement

Career Distinctiveness

Incentives and Motivation

Remuneration

Competency Management of Civil Servants

Why Study the Bureaucracy?

  • The bureaucracy has become critical in government decision-making, continues to grow in influence and has become powerful in the post-World War II decades
  • Rose’s study shows that initially goods and services delivered by government comprised defence and tax collection; this list subsequently grew to include a range of other services such as public infrastructure and social development services as a result of increasingly complex modern economic and social life.
  • As such, bureaucratic growth can be understood as both a “precondition to economic growth” as well as a response to rapidly-evolving society, and is thus a reflection of government spending as well as government revenue.

Bureaucratic Accountability and transparency

  • the bureaucracy must also be appreciated for operating under far more constraints than private organisations.
  • They are subjected to oversight and direction by the elected politicians, political institutions such as the courts and legislature, pressure groups and the citizens.
  • As a result, the bureaucracy is subject to “different objectives, more control and monitoring, more red-tape, less autonomy and higher levels of formalisation in public organisations”

Critique on Bureaucracy

  • The bureaucracy itself endured criticisms by both government and citizens alike, calling it a power-seeking, monolithical institution of Leviathan-proportions
  • Others paint the bureaucracy as a “court jester” that clumsy inept group of uncoordinated agencies that “muddle” through redundantly choreographed activities
  • Niskanen argued that the heads of the bureaucracies or career bureaucrats were simply budget maximisers, who were able to hide and manipulate the true costs of public service delivery; they did so to increase their allocated budget to beyond what was necessary
  • No clear transparency: Niskanen also argued that these bureaucrats were beyond the oversight of the legislature as only they were privy to information regarding service delivery; as such the legislature neither had the ability to override the claims made by the bureaucracy nor were they able to independently adjust budget allocation to the bureaucracy based on their own judgements

Proposed solution: Privatisation

  • To mitigate such effects, it is proposed that the bureaucracy be marketised, where competition among various agencies offering the same goods and services at the lowest prices and best services would lower cost and increase efficiency

Elements of Weber's ideal Bureaucracy

  • Weber’s conception of an ideal-type bureaucracy reflects the bureaucratic ethos and included the following elements:
    • an organisation comprised of bureaucrats or civil servants who perform duties in specific areas delegated to them;
    • these civil servants also use written documents,
    • have budgets and powers allocated to them to carry out their duties
    • have been trained in a particular field of specialisation
    • are professional and strictly adhere to official, hierarchical controls
    • the civil servants are long-tenure bureaucrats and receive remuneration and promotion based on their seniority and performance

Characteristics of Weber's ideal Bureaucracy

  • The following are specific characteristics that Weber has enumerated
    • There is a clear hierarchy of civil servants
    • The functions of the civil servants are clearly specified
    • Civil servants are appointed on a contractual basis
    • Civil servants only observe the impersonal duties of their offices
    • Civil servants are recruited on the basis of professional qualifications and this position is the civil servant’s sole or major profession
    • Civil servants are paid remuneration in accordance to their position within the hierarchy and enjoy some form of pension
    • Civil servants are free to resign from their posts; under certain specified circumstances, they may also be terminated
    • Civil servants are subject to a career and promotion structure based on seniority, merit, and judgement of performance
    • Civil servants may not appropriate their positions or any of the resources they are allocated in the course of their duties
    • Civil servants are subjected to a unified control and disciplinary system overseen by their superiors.

Bureaucratic Pathology

  • Pathology and dysfunction refer to a syndrome of “sickness common among the governmental organizations that substantially reduce their effectiveness in successfully implementing the policies and programmes”
    • Bureaucracy earned the reputation of being bloated and creating work for themselves by “manufacturing several organisational paraphernalia”. This maximised budgets unnecessarily, while making it appear that such expenditures are routine and necessary.
  • bureaucracy systematically rewards incompetence as civil servants are allegedly promoted more on the basis of seniority, rather than performance
  • Bureaucratic bashing: politicians engage in bureaucratic bashing as they aim to use bureaucrats as “handy scapegoats for disenchantment with government”
    • bureaucratic bashing is often unjustified, exaggerated and should not necessarily be encouraged as it is an “undesirable or unneeded flogging of public employees”
    • bureaucratic bashing has led to a “natural distrust of bureaucracy (that) has been twisted into a permanent cynicism”

Bureaucratic Pathology in South east asia

  • Bureaucratic pathology is also seen in Southeast Asia but in a slightly different form - a blurring of the demarcation between private and public sectors, with the bureaucracy seen as attempting to hijack societal surplus instead of channelling them into public service delivery.
  • There are three general ways in which such pathologies occur in Southeast Asian bureaucracies, spanning as far back as the pre-modern era.
  1. Firstly, the bureaucracy starts to get bloated and overstaffed, with concurrent increases in civil servants’ salaries and benefits.
  2. Next, the bureaucracy tends to involve itself in corporate economy activities.
  3. Finally, there is a creation of “bureaucratic capitalism”, which sees bureaucrats pursuing private economic gain either personally or via clients.

Fixing Bureaucratic pathology

  • Bureaucratic pathology subsequently called for fixes in the image of market-oriented reforms to
    • “make bureaucracy more streamlined,entrepreneurial, competitive, customer driven, enterprising, and results oriented”, leading to programmes such as “zero-based budgeting, management by objectives, program planning budgeting systems, reinventing government, and the general methods of the new public management”

Issues with reform

  • :market-oriented reforms is actually based on neoclassical economics and unwittingly reiterates the original bureaucratic ethos in public administration, counter-intuitively trapping bureaucracy in a cycle of reform and criticism

Over coming reform issues

  • One possible way would be to adopt a framework that features a professional and independent bureaucracy that is simultaneously autonomous and insulated enough from pressures in society that may hinder it from discharging its duties effectively, and yet not that autonomous that it is able to disregard and override its professional obligation to serve public interests and complement policymaking efforts of elected politicians.
  • This is much similar to the “power, continuity and autonomy of elite bureaucrats” (Weiss, 1988), a characteristic of the developmental state model.
  • However, it remains to be seen if there is sufficient political will to reform bureaucracies as such, in Southeast Asian countries that tend to thrive on quite the opposite hitherto.

Case Study: The Importance of the Civil Service to ASEAN

  • At the 30th ASEAN Summit in 2017, all ten ASEAN members signed a declaration to recognise the importance of the civil service in achieving the ASEAN Community Vision 2025.
  • The declaration explains that the ASEAN members recognise the centrality of the civil service in providing good governance in the Southeast Asian region in the following ways:
    • providing critical public services to the ASEAN citizens;
    • directing national and social development
    • responsible administering of public resources
    • managing evolving relationships between government and citizens
    • being visionary and proactive to tackle forthcoming challenges.
  • The declaration also highlighted that ASEAN members recognised the role of the civil service as an impetus for collaboration and cooperation across various instituition

Operationalisine the ASEAN

  • In doing so, the ASEAN members pledged to do the following, among others:
    • promote cooperation in the development and implementation of capacity-building programmes and share best practices in critical policy areas, including good governance and talent recruitment, retainment and skills-building in the civil services of ASEAN
    • raise professionalism and capacities of civil servants and enhance crosssector cooperation and collaboration
    • ensure civil services in ASEAN member states embrace good governance principles so as to build resilient, trustworthy, future-ready and citizencentric government institutions
    • promote welfare of civil servants in ASEAN member states, especially those who are deployed for disaster-response
    • strengthen alliances among ASEAN member states, dialogue partners and other non-state stakeholders such as civil society organisations and businesses.

Colonial experience

  • Different colonial legacies imparted different cultural and structural consequences on different countries,
    • depending largely on what purposes the colonies served, how they were acquired and the political culture of the colonial powers.
      • For instance, Burma (now Myanmar) was colonised via punitive expeditions, resulting in the displacement of King Thibaw in 1885 and colonial rule imposed from India.
      • On the other hand, British Malaya (now Malaysia) was part of the Straits Settlements, and was considered to be critical as these were territories acquired to protect critical sea-lanes
    • The diversity is especially pronounced in the Southeast Asian region that experienced Latin, Spanish, American, Anglo and European legacies.

British Colonial Legacy in the Hong Kong Civil Service

  • Positive experience: The British colonial legacy has had more of a positive impact on the Hong Kong civil service in three major ways
    • civil service culture is merit-based
    • attention to the provision of infrastructure and public service delivery
    • population policies to boost economic advantage
  • Professionalism: the “culture of professionalism” is a feature of Hong Kong’s civil service even today, where the bureaucratic ethos in Hong Kong features values such as
    • “hierarchical loyalty,
    • efficiency, meritocracy, and
    • political neutrality”
    • with compliance and strict adherence to rules and regulations, especially at the lower levels
  • Recent scrutiny: Hong Kong had recently come under scrutiny for gifting its civil servants' perks that British expatriates had once received as hardship allowances (i.e. allowances, access to overseas education, etc)
    • Many of these perks seem unnecessary and wasteful and cost taxpayers billions of dollars yearly
    • Examples include using public finances to maintain official residences of senior public servants who claim to use these official residences to entertain foreign guests

Latin Colonial Legacy in the Filipino Civil Service

  • Many scholars argue that the Latin colonial legacies have had a negative impact on administrative cultures in the Philippines and Macau
  • In the Filipino case, the bureaucracy was built on a framework that served to enrich those who occupied positions within the bureaucracy and public office was seen as a business opportunity.
    • Spanish nationals occupied public service positions, while the Filipino natives were relegated to the lowest rungs of the hierarchy
  • General attitudes: Its bureaucracy was imbibed with two general attitudes,
    • that of outright indifference and
    • a lack of commitment to public office and this legacy has lived on till today
  • Negative observations: Filipino civil service was observed to have exhibited
    • rent-seeking behaviour,
    • corruption,
    • lack of compliance to rules and incompetence and has been accused of being “arrogant, aloof, arbitrary and corrupt in its behaviour (where) almost 50% of government expenditures is lost to corruption”
  • Deep seated issue : There have been many attempts to overcome these problems, where reform and reorganisation were said to be on the agenda of every government that has come to power since 1940, and yet the issues of impartiality, corruption and resistance have remained

Cambodia

  • MCS: Established in 2013, Cambodia’s Ministry of Civil Service (MCS) is the central organisation responsible for the Cambodian civil service.
    • It is tasked to direct and develop the public service sector of Cambodia
  • Goals and Activities: The MCS is founded on three main strategies of the Royal Government
    • strengthening the quality and effectiveness of public service delivery, specifically focusing on responsiveness, trust of service consumers, effectiveness and efficiency
    • capacity development to improve civil servants’ performance, motivation, loyalty and professionalism
    • pay and remuneration reform of civil servants
  • Recent Key Initiatives of the Cambodian Civil Service:
    • Priority Mission Groups, which sees a select
      group of civil servants carrying out urgent reform
    • E-governance has also been embraced by the MCS - in 2017, a smartphone app, Cambodia Public Services, was introduced to facilitate Cambodian citizens’ access to government services
  • Issues:
    • access to public service delivery, especially by poorer Cambodians living in rural Cambodia is uneven, according to the World Bank

Laos

  • Objective: Laos’s MoHA’s objectives are to
    • promote resilient governance,
    • organisational stability and
    • a competent and professional civil service, characterised by effectiveness and responsiveness to the Lao PDR citizens