services such as health, education and firefighting– through appeals to the public in support of claims against the government over pay and working conditions can be considerable.

Consequently, despite the fact that “good governance” and the public administration reform have been a central focus of statebuilding and development programs on the part of major international donor agencies for the past twenty years, the record of success of donor-sponsored public administration reform programs is poor and the process is widely recognized as intensely political (Heredia and Schneider 2003, Gisselquist and Resnick 2014, Hillman 2013).

This brief review of the literature suggests that in considering systemic reform programs aimed at transforming public sector organizations, there is much scope for elaborating on mainstream change management techniques. Specifically, we suggest that change management models for public service organizations need to take on board the specific challenges of the relationship between the administrative and the political spheres, and the particularities of institutional culture in various public sector agencies. The argument of this paper is that political economy analysis can offer important insights supporting the development of change management strategies for governance and public sector reform in developing countries.

# 1.2 Application of Political Economy in Development Operations

There are different approaches to political economy analysis in the literature and this has left development practitioners confused or remain in doubt regarding its utility. Here we summarize four key approaches to political economy in the literature, and draw out the potential of political economy analysis for informing approaches for change management.

A “public choice” model of political economy analysis proceeds from the assumption that the key actors are individuals, who operate in a broadly level playing field, maintain complete utility preference sets and make rational choices to maximize utility in any given situation. The emphasis on utility maximization in public choice models tends to promote a conception of civil servants as self-interested, rather than as dedicated to serving the public interest, and to explain civil service failures as a result of a tendency on the part of civil servants to attempt to divert resources to their own ends at the expense of the common good (Mueller 2015). These approaches pay scant attention to the issue of political values or ideas (Hudson and Leftwich 2014). It is challenged by a significant empirical literature based on attitude surveys undertaken with cohorts of public servants in different countries, which produces fairly consistent evidence that public servants are more likely than other citizens to have altruistic attitudes (Houston 2000; Wright 2001; Leisink and Steijn 2009; Kim and Vandenabeele 2010). Furthermore, the pessimistic assumptions underlying public choice theory makes life extraordinarily difficult for proponents of progressive reform, as Grindle and Thomas note: “if policy makers and public managers are conceptualized as “rent seekers” motivated only by the desire to remain in power, little can be expected of them in terms of leadership or the management of change” (Grindle and Thomas 1993, p. 4-5). This would limit the possibility for any reasonable dialogue on specific policy and incremental changes, which actually take place. Such stripped-down models of the motivation of public servants and their leaders have a certain methodological elegance, but are less useful to practitioners engaged in the messy day-to-day processes of dealing with public servants working through difficult and contested processes of reform.

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