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Full Description
Building an effective civil service is crucial for public service delivery and good governance, but reforming bureaucratic institutions is notoriously difficult. This book takes a fresh perspective on this challenge by documenting and analyzing the implementation of more than one hundred reforms initiated by six African countries over the last thirty years.
Martin J. Williams shows that these efforts largely fell short of their goals because they typically approached organizational change as a matter of changing formal structures and processes through one-off projects. Some did yield positive changes, however, when they were able to create opportunities for civil servants to discuss performance and how to improve it. Drawing on this evidence, Williams develops a new theory of how systemic reforms can lead to meaningful change—not by trying to force it through top-down interventions but by catalyzing an ongoing and decentralized process of continuous improvement.
Reform as Process makes theoretical and empirical contributions to research on organizational performance, civil service reform, and public service delivery, and it shares practical insights and strategies to help reformers around the world achieve meaningful change in their organizations.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I. Setting the Scene
1. The Puzzle of Reform
2. Theory and Evidence on Organizational Performance
Part II. Understanding Patterns of Reform
3. What Does Reform Look Like? Mapping Reform Efforts over Time
4. The "What" of Reform: Focusing on the Formal, Neglecting the Informal
5. The "How" of Reform: Projectization and Its Consequences
6. Mechanisms of Success: Opportunities and Energy for Performance Improvement
Part III. Reform as Process
7. Reform as Process: Theory
8. Reform as Process in Ghana, 2014-2019
9. A Pragmatic Approach to Reform
Appendix: Country Reform Histories
Background, Data, and Methods
Notes
Bibliography
Index
