Leadership and Culture

Comparative Models of Top Civil Servant Training

Kenneth A. Loparo, A. Hondeghem, E. Schwella, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, A. Hondeghem, E. Schwella, Kenneth A. Loparo, Montgomery Van Wart, Vivien E. Nice, Montgomery Van Wart, A. Hondeghem, E. Schwella, Vivien E. Nice

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137454126
• eBook ISBN: 9781137454133
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection examines the leadership training of public administration in 19 countries and provides information on where, what, and how the training occurs as well as the up-to-date cultural, political, economic background for each. Factors affecting perceived importance, quality and robustness of top civil servant training are examined.

Part I

Training Senior Civil Servants in Anglo-American Countries

1

Australia

John Halligan

Introduction

A basic premise of this chapter is that public service leadership is substantially a product of administrative culture, which in turn is reflected in how senior public servants are trained. The extent to which administrative culture is a decisive factor and how training shapes leadership development needs to be explored against the backdrop of a country’s political structure and public management paradigms that contextualize, focus, and channel the institutions and programs for developing the capabilities of senior public servants. The training model for a public service system is also subject to internal perspectives about the provision of training and development, agency needs, and conceptions of leadership.

Australia has been strongly influenced by British tradition, but the result needs to be considered within its New World context and the environmental factors that have shaped its identity. A strong strain of egalitarianism has been pervasive in Australian society and has influenced how the Australian senior public service has been constituted. Nevertheless, the managerialization of the national public sector has been the most enduring feature of the last three decades, and approaches to leadership associated with Anglophone systems have been prevalent.

Political and Administrative Structure

Australia has been a federal system since 1901. It is comprised of six states and two territories with substantial autonomy in their operations that derive from a written constitution, although interdependencies between levels are highly significant. Each jurisdiction has its own public service and is responsible for local government. Another central feature is responsible government based on a Westminster type of parliamentary system, which means that the government is formed from members of Parliament, to which it is accountable.

Employees in the national public sector account for 16 percent of the workforce, but employees of the Australian public service (APS; at the federal level) account for less than 1 percent. There were 154,307 APS employees in 2012. Of this number, 2,786 (1.8 percent) were in the senior executive service (SES).

The APS number has fluctuated over the last three decades according to fiscal stringency and other agendas. Over the last 15 years, the numbers have risen by 30 percent, but the increase in the SES has been 78 percent. Top civil servants are defined as members of the SES, although arguably the “top” category covers departmental secretaries and deputy secretaries and their equivalents in other agencies under the Public Service Act.

The Australian approach to the reform of public sector governance is distinctive in international terms. The reforms were comprehensive and systemic from an early stage of the reform era (from the early 1980s to the 2000s). Australia was one of a small number of countries, mainly Anglophone, which moved toward a new public management (NPM) model. Anglophone countries—Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand—have been regarded as a coherent group because of their common tradition and historical and continuing close associations and interactions with institutional roots in the British tradition (Halligan 2010).

A number of factors have reinforced the identity of the Anglophone group over time. Continuing patterns of interaction—historically formed and culturally supported—have been highly significant. The export and transfer of British institutions, first within the empire and later the commonwealth, provided mechanisms of communication among the countries based on a common language and cultural legacy. The long-standing relationship with the United Kingdom has been maintained because it furnishes the head of state, but endogenous communication patterns have been influential with active networks that include regular meetings and circulation of ideas and practices.

Administrative traditions reflect values and principles that are influential in shaping structures, behaviors, and cultures. Four features provide a basis for characterizing administrative traditions: state and society, management and law, political and administrative roles, and variations in law and administration (Peters 2003). For Anglophone systems, the concept of the state, the role of management, and the nature of political and administrative relationships point to an instrumental interpretation.

The Anglophone tradition was reaffirmed during the reform era. Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom were grouped together because they adhered more to the precepts of “new public management” than other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. At the peak of the OECD fixation on NPM, the Anglophone experiments were upheld as the ideal (OECD 1995). The reform movement served to reinforce the notion of the group’s identity as distinctive from that of other traditions and was also expressed through how leadership was conceived and the devolution of responsibilities to line departments (Halligan 2012).

Changing Expectations of the Senior Public Service

In the post–World War II period, an American observed that “both the Australian and United States Services are based on a similar classification concept, give wide scope to the specialist, and are founded on a strong and valuable egalitarian tradition” (Scarrow 1957: 139–140). The strength of the Australian tradition was subsequently tested as new conceptions contended for recognition prior to the emergence of the SES.

The British administrative class had long served as a model for Australian reformers. Its basis was a group of generalists specifically recruited from universities and displaying certain qualities. Official inquiries had recommended developing the senior public service along the lines of the administrative class, but it was only once the need for a senior service became pressing that there was movement in this direction. With the expansion of the role and size of the federal government during and following the Second World War, new regulatory mechanisms and policymaking processes were required. The higher public service expanded as greater specialization and a larger second division—comprising senior officials immediately below the department heads—became necessary (Scarrow 1957).

A Committee of Inquiry into Public Service Recruitment had in 1959 recommended creating an administrative class modeled on the British system; this would have involved the direct entry of recruits into the training classes of an enlarged second division. The committee’s plan differed from the British model in several respects, such as social context and form of recruitment, but in terms of purpose there was a resemblance, as a group of senior public servants was envisaged who would focus on policy, relationships with politicians, and processing the work of program specialists. The influence of egalitarianism, however, remained too entrenched for an elitist concept to receive support (Halligan 1992).

An Australian administrative elite nevertheless emerged as the result of incremental moves toward cultivating a senior public service. The constraints on recruiting graduates were relaxed and the education of staff was given greater recognition. The numbers of graduate entrants with general, rather than specialist, degrees increased, and the graduate generalist acquired a more prominent role than the specialist. The second division gained recognition as a cadre of top administrators, and it became official policy to develop its corporate identity (Wheeler 1964: 293–294; Crisp 1970). Canberra’s variant of an administrative and policy elite became a reality.¹ Under the coalition government (1949–1972), the power of the senior public service increased, and the Canberra mandarin became entrenched.

Pressure to expand the influence of politicians intensified in the 1970s. The bureaucracy was seen as too elitist, independent, and unrepresentative and as insufficiently responsive. The reaction was to challenge the public servants’ monopoly on giving advice to ministers and to question their indispensability to the processes of government. The ministers increasingly relied on alternative sources of advice and assistance.

The managerial model crystallized in the early 1980s amid a growing consensus about the deficiencies of the public service under the traditional public administration. Management failures in specific agencies had influenced these attitudes, and a bipartisan view emerged that the management skills of the senior public service officials were deficient and had been undervalued relative to policy and administrative skills. There was also growing pressure to give public servants and departments greater freedom from procedural constraints. These sentiments were reflected in public reviews that advocated greater emphasis on mobility, external recruitment, flexibility in deployment, staff appraisal, appointment to levels rather than positions, and a servicewide approach (JCPA 1982).

Politicians and the Senior Public Service

Under the Westminster model, relations between politicians and bureaucrats were traditionally centered on a neutral public service that coexisted with a responsible government (Aucoin 1995; Boston and Halligan 2011). The relationship was predicated on an apolitical public service that served the political executive regardless of party. The political executive, in turn, respected the integrity of the civil service by maintaining its apolitical and professional character. Specific features of this system were the career public servant, a permanent official who survived successive governments, and senior appointments drawn from the ranks of careerists. The ministerial department was the repository of policy knowledge, and the permanent head, as the primary adviser to government, had a special relationship with the minister. Although the minister had the constitutional right to make decisions, in practice, the permanent head was responsible for operational matters.

There was a succession of challenges to this arrangement. Over time, the trend was toward strengthening the political executive, periodically punctuated by debates on issues that slowed the rate of change, constrained political pressures on the public service, and clarified aspects of the relationship. The debates were over the loss of permanent positions for departmental secretaries (in the 1980s), the rise of political advisers (from the 1980s to the 2010s), the turnover of secretaries (in 1996 and 2013), and the demands on the public service from new governments (in 1996, 2009, and 2013). The question of advisers continues to be an issue in terms of their number (about 450), status, and lack of experience. One significant rebalancing initiative has been to formalize the departmental secretaries’ roles in policy, management, and stewardship (Halligan 2013).

Organizational-Administrative Culture

The organizational culture has evolved significantly since the 1970s as the approach to public administration changed rapidly. The changes can be summarized with reference to phases of reform. “Managerialism” best defines the first phase, a period in which management became the central concept in a paradigm change. It was succeeded by a second phase that came close to the mainstream depiction of NPM (Hood 1991) in which the market element was favored and a private sector focus was at the forefront. This NPM phase was followed, though not displaced, in the 2000s by a third phase that emphasized the integration of governance (Halligan 2007; Edwards et al. 2012) and incipient new public governance.

The initial period of reform in the 1980s replaced traditional public administration with a package of reforms based on management. Over about a decade, a new management philosophy was developed and implemented, which replaced the emphasis on inputs and processes with an emphasis on results (Halligan and Power 1992). The reform program mainly focused on the core public service, including commercialization, corporatization, decentralization, creation of a senior public service (i.e., the SES), and improving financial management. The focus on results, outcomes, and performance-oriented management dates from this time. The first core capabilities for the SES were produced in 1987, and in 1990, the six SES classifications were reduced to three bands to allow for greater flexibility and effectiveness in managing the senior service.

Although the first reform phase showed signs of incipient NPM in several respects, the dominant theme was improving management. The commitment to neoliberal economic reforms in the second phase in the 1990s led to the public service becoming highly decentralized, marketized, contractualized, and privatized. The agenda also covered a deregulated personnel system; regulation and oversight of service delivery; and the contestability of the delivery of services in order to allow greater use of the private sector. A new financial-management framework was introduced in the late 1990s, including the implementation of outputs and outcomes reporting and agency devolution in budget estimates and financial management. The devolution of responsibilities from central agencies to line departments and agencies was a highly significant step, with a diminished role for central agencies being one consequence (Halligan 2006). The Public Service Act 1999 outlined the responsibilities, the capability framework, and the selection criteria of the SES.

Integrated governance appeared as a new phase in the 2000s and had an impact on the relationships within, and the coherence of, the public service; on delivery and implementation; and on performance and responsiveness to government policy. Four dimensions drew together fundamental aspects of governance: the resurrection of the central agency as a major actor with more direct influence over departments; whole-of-government as the new expression of a range of forms of coordination; central monitoring of agency implementation and delivery; and departmentalization through rationalizing the nondepartmental sector (Halligan 2006). For the SES, the statement “One APS—One SES” reaffirmed the commitment to “a single SES across a single devolved APS” in which all SES were expected “to exhibit common capabilities, share common values, common ethical standards, and a common commitment to development and collaboration” (Management Advisory Committee 2005).

A review of Australian government administration produced a new “blueprint” (Advisory Group on the Reform of Australian Government Administration [AGRAGA] 2010). The report’s recommendations covered leadership and strategic direction; public sector workforce capability; and reforms, including a strengthened Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) for driving change, strategic planning, and expectations for agencies (agility, capability, effectiveness, and efficiency). Specific recommendations addressed the roles and responsibilities of secretaries, strengthening leadership, and assessing the SES. They also reflected the emerging importance of collaborative relations internally as well as with personnel in other levels of government and nongovernmental actors.

Of particular significance were the recommendations associated with a reconstituted APSC as the lead agency for reform. The commission’s approach was to collaborate with departments and agencies in pursuit of common outcomes (Sedgwick 2011). The Public Service Amendment Act 2013 provided the legislative basis for the revised roles of a number of actors: the departmental secretary, a secretaries’ board, the SES, and the public service commissioner. Reformulated public service values were also enacted.

Structure and Content of Training

The centerpiece of training and development for the public service has been the Australian Public Service Commission,² although the extent of its role has varied over time, and has depended on the willingness of departments to make use of its frameworks and programs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Understanding the Role and Context of Senior Civil Servant Training
• Part I Training Senior Civil Servants in Anglo-American Countries
• Part II Training Senior Civil Servants in Eastern European Countries
• Part III Training Senior Civil Servants in Germanic and Northern European Countries
• Part IV Training Senior Civil Servants in Latin European Countries
• Part V Training Senior Civil Servants in Other Countries
• Conclusion: Understanding the Reasons for the Differences in Importance, Quantity, and Quality of SCS Training
• Index