particular solution appear more attractive to decision makers. At the same time, efforts to promote the confidence, resources and assertiveness of particular groups of actors can enhance political pressure in favor of particular trajectories of change. Thus even though change management strategies may be limited in forcing change through where there is no appetite for change at all, they may nevertheless be decisive in contexts where a government is looking for solutions to a particular problem.

Where a systemic reform program is envisaged, change management strategies must address a broad set of issues emerging from the institutional culture of the public service unit. In line with the political economy analysis approach outlined, in this study institutional culture is defined as a set of working practices, relationships and values that characterize a public service organization. The particular form of institutional culture in any state institution is partly endogenous, maintained by internal working practices and relationships and the values upon which they are based and which they reinforce. It is also strongly affected by external relationships with political leaders, with international development partners in an emerging country context, and with the broader public constituted as national citizens, as public service clients, and as civil society. Institutional culture is not static, but it is closely connected to dynamics of power and the role of the state generally, and of the particular public service unit in question, in managing the relationship between ruling elites and society more broadly.

External pressure emanating from a changing political situation, both directly on public servants through their engagement with the public through their work and more widely, and via the articulation of new political strategies by political leaders, will affect institutional culture, but the effect of this will be contingent, depending upon whether such pressures can be accommodated by, or require the relinquishment of, key norms of behavior. Public awareness of and concern about reform issues in turn partly determines the articulation of the specific reform program with broader political strategies, thus closing the circle.

Understanding change management strategies as an element in the broader political and administrative context allows both a wider conceptualization of how change might be promoted, and a more sophisticated awareness of the different sources of potential resistance or readiness for change. In this study, consequently, we consider the evolving political economy of the reform context as the key set of structures within which both the political strategies of elites and the institutional culture of the state apparatus emerge; however, this does not imply that these two things are necessarily congruent. Political leaders and bureaucrats have different relationships to the political economy contexts and therefore respond differently to structural change, and this gives rise to the potential for change that is mandated by the government to be resisted by public servants.

Combining political economy analysis with a portfolio of change management techniques can tailor those techniques to an integrated analysis of how the political economy context informs the interaction between a political strategy for change and the institutional culture of the public sector organizations involved in that change. It can unpack the implications for particular reforms inherent in the political economy context and the way that this is reflected in political strategies and in the institutional culture of public sector organizations. Consequently, political economy analysis can offer change managers important information about whether there is a significant window of opportunity for reform – do sufficiently powerful sections of either the political elite, or the public service, or both have enough interest in reform to make significant change possible? Second, it can disaggregate the nature of different 7