| Public Administration
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From Ethos - Issue 4, April 2008
Editorial
...However, there is now a sense that the low-hanging fruits of public service
reform and efficiency gains have been mostly identified, if not harvested. Is it
enough to make public service delivery and government transactions ever faster,
less onerous or more courteous? Professor B. Guy Peters argues that the
relationship between public servants and the citizens they serve needs to be
re-examined and perhaps restated. Ng Wee Wei, from the Accenture consultancy
group, proposes outcome targets for public service based on the delivery of
social value, and The Honourable Jocelyne Bourgon from Canada believes that it
is time for governments to define a fundamentally new model of public service
that matches today’s complex challenges which cut across many different sectors
of activity...
Reclaiming
Public Administration
Jocelyne Bourgon
Public administrations are a vehicle for expressing the values and preferences
of citizens, communities and societies. The past thirty years have been
a rich period of experimentation in public administration, aimed at making
government more efficient, effective, productive, transparent and responsive. It
was also a period where much was learned about the importance of good governance
and the shared responsibilities of the private sector, the public sector, civil
society and citizens to ensure a high standard of living and quality of life. As
a result, the current practice of public administration is no longer entirely
consistent with the Classic model. Yet, practitioners do not have a modern,
integrated theory adapted to today’s circumstances. It is time to
integrate the core values of the past with the lessons of the last thirty years
to develop a new synthesis of public administration to guide practitioners
serving citizens in the 21st century
Not
Just Service Delivery
B. Guy Peters
In the past several decades, governments have become increasingly aware of the
importance of good service delivery to their citizens. Faced in some cases with
manifestly poor quality services, as well as with numerous claims of
inefficiency and ineffectiveness, leaders in the public sector have invested a
great deal of energy in improving the quality of public services. This
improvement has come about in part by outsourcing services, following the adage
of the New Public Management that governments are better at steering than at
rowing. For those public services that have remained directly in the public
sector, however, quality has been a major concern and there have been numerous
efforts to make those services both more efficient and more satisfactory for the
public.
Creating
and Measuring Public Service Value
Ng Wee Wei
Governments around the world are putting pressure on their public managers to
improve service quality and deliver efficiency at the same time: to do more, for
less. After all, managers in the private sector face similar pressures and they
are expected to deal with them as a matter of routine. Why should the same not
be asked of their public sector counterparts? The reality, however, is that
there are such significant differences between what private and public sector
organisations produce that simplistic comparisons of this kind are very
misleading. Private sector organisations exist to create value for their
shareholders. For managers in the private sector, organisational performance is
measured rather straightforwardly and objectively (but not exclusively) in terms
of financial profit or loss.
Instead of profit or loss or shareholder value, however,
public service organisations aim to generate public value: a direct and not
always immediate benefit to service recipients and the wider community of
citizens, businesses and taxpayers. That value—be it education, public safety,
health and other aspects of the public good—can be difficult to identify and
causally relate to service delivery.
Leveraging
Networks for Public Service Delivery
Nicholas Mai, Tang Tee Sing and Yeo Yaw Shin
Reinventing
Singapore’s Electronic Public Services
Karen Wong
Better,
Faster, Cheaper: Service Transformation and Channel Migration at the
Ministry of Manpower
Penny Han
Ten
Tips: How to Create a Next Generation Public Service Super-Portal
Rosina Howe-Teo
Service
Beyond Excellence
Interview with Ng Hock Keong
Integrated
Service Delivery: The Australian Department of Human Services
Jeff Popple
What
Does It Mean to Optimise Public Service Delivery?
Lee Chong Hock and John Lim
Book
Review: Public Services at the Crossroads
Garvin Chow
Governance
at the Leading Edge: Black Swans, Wild Cards, and Wicked Problems
Peter Ho
At the 2008 Strategic Perspectives Conference, Head of
Civil Service Peter Ho traced the evolution of contemporary public sector
practice. He concludes that while the Public Service has successfully adopted
best practices from the private sector and elsewhere in the past, these are not
enough to ensure good governance as we move into an unpredictable and complex
future. In the following excerpt, he highlights the nature of the challenges
ahead and argues that Singapore must develop its own new brand of governance in
order to manage these critical uncertainties and generate original solutions to
the wicked problems of our time.
Managing
Complexity and Uncertainties
Lam Chuan Leong
Governments should make provisions for increasingly
unpredictable and disruptive outcomes in the future, argues Lam Chuan Leong,
Senior Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Leadership.
History is not without its disruptive surprises. At the end of
the 19th century, it was thought that everything that could be known had been
discovered. Yet only a few years later came the x-ray, sub-atomic particles,
nuclear fission and other discoveries that completely changed the
world.
Clearly, however, the pace and nature of disruptive change is
evolving more rapidly than ever before. It is now commonplace to assert that the
world is more complex and uncertain...
The
Challenge of Growth
Interview with Paul Romer
When people think about the development process, they sometimes look for a
silver bullet, or the one policy or model that will drive growth. I think that
is too naive. The growth process is very complicated. There are no silver
bullets, no single model that everyone can copy. Singapore is a distinctive case
of successful development under unusual conditions, so we should think of
Singapore not as a model but as a very interesting data point.
I think
the Singapore Government has done the right thing by conceptualising development
around the idea of a city rather than a nation. Singapore’s development as a
financial centre à la New York or London is well underway; perhaps Hong Kong is
a little bit ahead but there is good reason to think Singapore will keep moving
up as a financial centre. You also have a clear vision of how to grow as an
entertainment and tourist destination.
The
Changing Face of Government
The ETHOS Roundtable with Dr Ashraf
Hassan Abdelwahab, Mr Feng Tie and Mr Mothusi Bruce Rabasha Palai
In a developing country, the government still has an extremely important role to
play in growing the economy. They have to create the necessary
environment—policies, regulations, laws—to ensure that businesses can then take
root and do what they do best. Therefore, the issue of public service culture is
an important one—they have to begin to see their role in the bigger picture, as
part of a larger economy, and learn to be more business-oriented. In the last 30
to 40 years, we have not emphasised enough their role as servants of the public
in this way, and it is time we went back to basics.
There are also issues
of coordination across different sectors—individual needs may involve many
different pieces of information and processes across different ministries, and
we need to achieve synergy among them.
Download
full version of Ethos as PDF
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United Nations Public Administration Network
The Division for Public Administration and Development Management of the
Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations was entrusted by
the General Assembly in late 1999 to develop and implement an important
programme entitled 'United Nations Public
Administration Network (UNPAN)', (originally referred to as
the United Nations Online Network in Public Administration and Finance).
UNPAN is designed to help countries, especially developing countries and
countries in economic transition, to respond to the challenges that governments
face in bridging the digital divide between the 'haves and have-nots'
and to achieve their development goals.
The immediate objective of UNPAN
is to establish an internet-based network that links regional and national
institutions devoted to public administration, thereby
facilitating information exchange, experience sharing, and training in the area
of public sector policy and management.
The long-term objective of UNPAN
is to build the capacity of these regional and national institutions, so that
they can access, process and disseminate relevant information by means
of up-to-date information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the
promotion of better public administration.
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From the World Bank Group
Public Sector and Governance
A fundamental role of the Bank is to
help governments work better in our client countries. The Public Sector Group's
objectives are based on the view that the Bank must focus more of its efforts on
building efficient and accountable public sector institutions -- rather than
simply providing discrete policy advice.
A
main lesson from East Asia (and to some extent Russia) is that good policies are
not enough -- that the Bank cannot afford to look the other way when a country
is plagued by deeply dysfunctional public institutions that limit
accountability, set perverse rules of the game, and are incapable of sustaining
development.
Overview of
Governance & Public Sector Reform:
- Organization - Key
Objectives - Areas
of Responsibility - Knowledge
Management - Professional
Development - Quality
Enhancements - Product
Innovations - Key
Partnerships
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