‘whether the President validly performed any function conferred on him ... shall not be inquired into by or in any court.’ The Constitution, and both primary and secondary legislation enacted over several decades, give the President immense direct powers, with few procedural checks on how he exercises them. Restoring the independence of the Public Service Commission (CSC) would require not just a constitutional amendment, as in Sri Lanka, but the revision or repeal of many separate but interlocking, and sometimes obscure, laws and procedures. As a consequence, Tanzania’s CSC had even less autonomy than its Sri Lankan and Swazi counterparts used to have, and senior public servants have precarious job security. A senior official remarked that ‘the President changes the top officers in the service in a similar way as (sic) he changes attire.’ _Source_ : Bana and McCourt (2006).

One can easily imagine the reluctance of senior Tanzanian officials to embark on a strategic initiative when they hold office at the President’s whim. ‘Strategic’ actions are intrinsically long-term, and officials would be foolish to expect to be around long enough to see them through. Tanzania’s staff management dispensation illustrates the way that the institutional, including legal and procedural, framework can create perverse as well as positive incentives for public servants.

# **8. Conclusion: From Failure to Success?**

‘Almost none (of the many identified factors affecting commitment to economic reform) seems to have a uniform effect across countries . . . Reform outcomes depend on complex combinations of a variety of factors.’ (Campos and Esfahani, 2000: 222) ‘Incomplete and even quite ambiguous explanations are about the most we should expect. This is not an area in which clear-cut, high-probability causal models can be developed - far from it.’ (Whitehead, 1990: 1145) ‘Answers must be invented for each country individually.’ (Nelson, 1990: 361) In the light of the confession of failure at the start of this paper, citing these quotations may look like gratuitous self-flagellation. However, they take on a more positive hue when we place them in the light of the problem-solving approach that I have proposed in this paper. Seen in that perspective, the suggestion arises that where the approaches failed, it was not because of their intrinsic deficiency, but because they were responses to problems which arose in one setting, but which did not arise in another.

We had a vivid example of this just as I was completing this paper. Under its new President, Dr Jim Kim, the World Bank has developed an interest in a so-called ‘science of delivery’. This has led in turn to an interest in initiatives such as Malaysia’s National Key Result Areas, because of the dramatic improvement in service outcomes which those initiatives have engendered. However, such initiatives presuppose that a government has made service delivery improvement a key objective, as Malaysia’s has done. Evidence is emerging – unfortunately but, from the perspective that we have taken in this paper, predictably - that where an approach like Malaysia’s has been attempted in countries which do not share that objective in any real sense, it has failed.

This example does seem to support the argument on which this paper is based, namely that we should begin by specifying the problem we are trying to solve, and only then move on to selecting an approach which will solve the problem, or at least help to solve it.

In this way, I hope that my review of models of public service reform and their trajectories suggests a way forward which readers will be able to pursue. Very different from public management specialists in industrialized countries, specialists in public management in development are frequently economists, with 20