# **1. Introduction: Facing Up to Failure**

When Apollo declared through his Oracle at Delphi that no one was wiser than Socrates, what the god was trying to get across (at least according to Socrates himself, who declined to take the compliment at face value) was that ‘The wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless’ (Plato, 1969: 52). To say that what we know about public service reform is ‘worthless’ would be an exaggeration. But a confession of our relative ignorance may still be the beginning of wisdom. As I shall discuss later on, the most robust evidence that we have of reform outcomes, in the shape of World Bank project evaluation reports, has been consistently disappointing over more than a decade. As recently as 2010, an internal Bank paper carried the title, _Why do Bank-supported public service reform efforts have such a poor track record?_ A confession will be fruitful if it helps us to frame the problem that faces us in a way that stimulates readers to propose approaches that stand a better chance of success than the ones we have been following up to now. That is what this paper tries to do.

# **2. Public Service Reform as Administrative Problem-Solving**

In this paper I review and analyze the experience of public service reform in developing countries. I define public service reform as ‘interventions that affect the organization, performance and working conditions of employees paid from central, provincial or state government budgets.’<sup>i</sup> I take a problemsolving approach, viewing the different reform interventions as ways of dealing with the problem situation as different national governments have defined it. I have borrowed ‘problem situation’ from Karl Popper (1989: 129).<sup>ii</sup> Popper argues that at any given point in the history of science, there is an agenda which arises from problems which current theories have created or failed to solve: ‘You pick up, and try to continue, a line of inquiry which has the whole background of the earlier development of science behind it.’ Similarly, it seems to us that at any given point in the development of public administration in a particular country, there is an agenda of problems which the previous experience of reform has created, and which confronts the most perceptive national policy-makers and other stakeholders.<sup>iii</sup> I am not alone in adopting a problem-driven approach. I follow Fritz _et al._ (2009). Andrews (2013) has developed an alternative and more elaborate problem-solving model in parallel with this paper. My paper, I suggest, augments theirs in one respect. Readers will be familiar with the saying that ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail.’ Identifying a problem, or problem situation, is not an end in itself. We must propose a solution. And when we do so, at least in the experience of the present writer, we tend to fall back on the tools in our reform toolbox; all too often, reform problems do get treated as ‘nails.’ If we are serious about respecting the specific priorities of developing country policymakers, then we need a variety of tools. In this sense, the models that are reviewed in this paper are offered as a reform toolbox.

In this paper I will emphasize problems as they are defined by the national (and sub-national) governments to which we referred above. It is their preoccupations and not development agencies’, nor domestic public society’s for that matter, which will be at the center of my analysis. Certainly, much domestic policy-making in our globalized world is informed by international policy models and by the experience of governments elsewhere that are regarded as role models. Likewise, civil society has risen to prominence in our models of governance. But my thinking is unapologetically state-centered on democratic principle: most governments these days are elected by their people, other actors are not.

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