The Politics of Public Sector Performance

Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries

Michael Roll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138956391
• eBook ISBN: 9781317934547
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or 'pockets of effectiveness' in developing countries.

Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential to trigger more comprehensive reforms and state-building? This book provides surprising answers to these questions, based on detailed case studies of exceptional public organizations and state-owned enterprises in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. The case studies are guided by a common analytical framework that is process-oriented and sensitive to the role of politics. The concluding comparative analysis develops a novel explanation for why some public organizations in the developing world beat the odds and turn into pockets of public sector performance and service delivery while most do not.

This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, development, organizations, public administration, public policy and management.

1 Introduction

Michael Roll

DOI: 10.4324/9781315857718-1

States in developing countries are not necessarily weak. Neither are they entirely ‘fragile’, ‘failing’ or ‘neopatrimonial’, to mention just a few of the most frequently used labels to describe states in the developing world. While these adjectives may capture key elements of the respective political and administrative systems, they are dangerous because they conceal the enormous variation both between the states thus labelled and within them. This book is about a particular phenomenon that has been largely ignored or only mentioned in passing precisely because it contradicts such general categorizations and labels: it is about public organizations that deliver public goods and services relatively effectively in contexts of largely ineffective government. Such exceptional organizations have been called ‘pockets of productivity’ (Daland 1981; Leonard 1991), ‘pockets of efficiency’ (Geddes 1990a) or ‘islands of excellence’ (Therkildsen 2008). We refer to them as ‘pockets of effectiveness’ (PoE) throughout this book since it is their effectiveness in fulfilling their official mandate by providing the public goods and services they are supposed to provide that differentiates them from other public organizations in their environment.¹

Before we present our research questions, the methodology and the case studies, we take a step back to locate our research within the recent academic and policy debates about governance in developing countries. We do this by giving a selective and to some degree stylized overview of perceptions of and reform approaches to governance and the state as well as the public sector in developing countries.

A stylized overview: governance, the public sector and development since 1990

Governance, the state and politics

After a short period of optimism that all countries would now converge towards liberal democracy after the collapse of communism (Fukuyama 1992), both academics and policy makers realized that this was not happening. What emerged instead was a world that did not fit into the ready-made concepts and categories. States that were guaranteed sovereignty by international law but lacked essential features of ‘empirical statehood’ (Jackson and Rosberg 1982) were therefore labelled ‘weak states’ (Reno 1998), ‘quasi-states’ (Jackson 1990), ‘fragile states’ (OECD-DAC 2007), ‘failed states’ (Rotberg 2003) or outright ‘collapsed states’ (Zartmann 1995). How to classify them and even more so how to deal with them became a major concern of development policy and at least since 11 September 2001 also of security policy and international politics more broadly. ‘State-building’ and modernized versions of ‘nation building’ rose to prominence in both academic and policy circles (see, for example, Fukuyama 2005 and Hippler 2005).

With regard to the regime question the third wave of democracy (Huntington 1991) also led to more heterogeneity and defied existing frameworks and theories. In political science, the transition paradigm first flourished (Diamond and Plattner 1996), then faltered and eventually collapsed (Carothers 2002). Gone were the underlying assumptions of teleology and the binary framework. Based on the confusing empirical realities that emerged new concepts were proposed such as ‘delegative democracy’ (O&Donnell 1994), ‘illiberal democracy’ (Zakaria 1997), ‘electoral authoritarianism’ (Schedler 2002), ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Levitsky and Way 2002), ‘semi-authoritarianism’ (Ottaway 2003), ‘defective democracy’ (Merkel 2004) or ‘hybrid regime’ (Diamond 2002), to mention but a few. Some of these concepts that Collier and Levitsky have so aptly labelled ‘democracies with adjectives’ (Collier and Levitsky 1997) grasped key features of the emerging ‘democratic grey area’ (Croissant 2002) regime subtypes. However, overall the sheer number and diversity of attempts to categorize them illustrate that both academics and policy makers found it hard to make sense of the new post-1990 forms of governance in the developing world.

For different reasons but just in time for this political and conceptual confusion, the World Bank had begun to use a concept that was to serve as an umbrella term for the coming decades precisely because it was broad and nonspecific: ‘governance’ (World Bank 1989).² Since the World Bank was not allowed to get involved in politics, it preferred technical and seemingly apolitical terms like this one. The normative blueprint for what should be achieved in this domain followed three years later: ‘good governance’ (World Bank 1992). This concept basically included all dimensions and reforms regarded as critical for development. Its very broadness and lack of prioritization was one of its main weaknesses. Attempts to trim the agenda down, focus on minimal conditions of governance in the sense of ‘good-enough governance’ (Grindle 2004) and offer tools to operationalize it (Grindle 2007) have only had limited success in addressing this problem. In part, this success was limited by the second major flaw of the good governance concept: its normative character which was based on a historically specific (Anglo-American) model of liberal political, social and economic development. While the World Bank preferred technocratic language, others have argued that — a third major problem — the good governance framework ignored the essentially political nature of the issues it addressed.³

This is also true for the new ‘development architecture’ that began to emerge at the end of the century. Debt relief, poverty reduction and eventually the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) began to dominate the development debate. At the same time, donor organizations finally began to look more critically at their own role in development cooperation and in development more generally. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (OECD 2005) formalized this process. Attached to these shifts was the move of some donor organizations from project to programme-based aid. Budget support, sector-wide approaches, ownership and donor coordination were some of the catchwords of the time.

Another notable development related to governance was the growing focus of the donor community on civil society, participation and social capital since the mid-1990s. These factors were regarded as crucial for democracy and development in their own right. However, with growing discontent about the stubborn resistance of states in the developing world to converge towards the models that development professionals had in mind, in part they began to see them as functional substitutes for many of those things states and governments failed to do (Houtzager 2003).

In broad strokes a normative governance framework, a technocratic approach to poverty reduction and a tendency by some donor organizations to bypass the state and the political process and instead focus on civil society were some of the main features of development policy roughly since the mid-1990s. In contrast to that, especially staff of development organizations working ‘on the ground’ in the country offices had ‘longstanding concerns … about the intractability of governance problems, and the failure of traditional reform approaches to make much impact’ (Dahl-Østergaard et al. 2005: 6). In response to these concerns, some organizations began to initiate detailed analyses, focussing on the ‘political and institutional factors that shaped development outcomes’ (ibid.: iv) in the early 2000s. The British Department for International Development (DFID) and the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) directly addressed ‘Drivers of Change’ and power issues, respectively (see ibid.: iv). Even the World Bank's Institutional and Governance Reviews explicitly included a focus on political issues and motives. While it is difficult to judge to which degree these political or political economy analyses have changed the policies, strategies and operational work of these organizations, they clearly signalled the demand for a better understanding of how governance, the state and politics were actually working in the developing world. While this was in part due to the very complexity of governance in developing countries, it was also a reaction to the prevalence of strong theoretical and normative assumptions and frameworks that had dominated the development debate on governance since the end of the Cold War.

Many researchers have been trying to improve our understanding of what is going on in terms of governance in developing countries in general — to the degree that this can be generalized — and in specific countries in particular. However, much of the research that ended up shaping policy in this field from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s was based on cross-country regression analyses, often to the detriment of more context-sensitive qualitative or mixed method comparative studies. The latter did not receive much attention in policy circles during this period. With the mounting critique of the good governance paradigm and the realization that our understanding of fundamental social and political processes in developing countries is limited this has changed in recent years. This is important because both kinds of research tend to produce different kinds of knowledge and often recommend different strategies of action. New research that is based on the latter type of research design challenges much of our common knowledge about governance and development. Below, we make reference to selected findings from two recent research projects that used this approach. These projects are the Centre for the Future State (Centre for the Future State 2010a) and the Africa Power and Politics Programme (Booth 2012).⁴ We reproduce these findings here for two reasons: first, to illustrate the point we have just made: how fundamentally this kind of research can challenge prevailing assumptions and beliefs about governance and development. The second reason is that we used a comparable research approach and our findings and theirs are often complementary and sometimes very similar. For the sake of brevity, for encouraging readers to consult the original reports and briefs and because these excerpts largely speak for themselves, we do not discuss the findings of these projects here in more detail:

1. Centre for the Future State:⁵
   • ‘The global environment creates perverse incentives for political elites to perpetuate fragile states’ (Centre for the Future State 2010a: 70).
   • ‘“Good governance” is a flawed approach’ (CFS 2010b: 4).
   • ‘Instead of “state building” and “state capacity”, think about “public authority”’ (CFS 2010a: 9).⁶ ‘Public authority can be created in unexpected ways’ (CFS 2010b: 8).
   • ‘States matter, but state building need not follow Western models’ (ibid.: 4).⁷
   • ‘State-society bargaining underpins the creation of effective, accountable public authority’ (ibid.: 7). ‘[Governments’ need for tax revenue has driven implicit or explicit bargaining with citizens, with the potential to enhance accountability’ (CFS 2010a: vii, 59–68; see also Bräutigam, Fjeldstad and Moore 2008).
   • ‘ … informal institutions and personalised relationships are pervasive and powerful and can contribute to progressive outcomes in poor count...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front-other Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pockets of effectiveness: review and analytical framework
• 3 Pockets of effectiveness: lessons from the long twentieth century in China and Taiwan
• 4 An enduring pocket of effectiveness: the case of the National Development Bank of Brazil (BNDE)
• 5 Turning Nigeria's drug sector around: the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC)
• 6 Taming the menace of human trafficking: Nigeria's National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Matters (NAPTIP)
• 7 ‘Confidence in our own abilities’: Suriname's State Oil Company as a pocket of effectiveness
• 8 Defying the resource curse: explaining successful state-owned enterprises in rentier states
• 9 Comparative analysis: deciphering pockets of effectiveness
• Bibliography
• Index