|Public Service Tribunal|Administrative appeals and redress|
|---|---|
|National Administrative Staff College|training and development|
|Line ministries|Day-to-daystaff management|

The position is further complicated in countries where public servants are organized into cadres or _corps_ , each with its own parent ministry (for example, the engineering _corps_ ).

An advantage of this allocation is that it separates executive and scrutiny functions. For example, public servants will appreciate having a forum for their appeals against management decisions which is outside their ministries’ line management structure. But it is easy to see how such a structure represents the ‘balkanization’ of human resource management from a strategic point of view, and a recipe for conflict between the different agencies. In the structural adjustment era when many governments were trying to reduce staff numbers, Ministries for the Public Service were often seen by their Finance counterparts as a Trojan horse inside government, acting as an informal public servants’ trade union to frustrate the aims of reform (Corkery and Land, 1996).

In theory, the remedy is simple: bring as many of the strategic functions together as possible in a single strategic agency. A few governments, such as South Africa’s, have moved in that direction, while leaving day-to-day management in the hands of their line ministries. But we should recognize this attractive remedy for what it is: centralization by another name.

## **Balancing National and Local Interests**

The pattern I have identified in this section is a continual rebalancing of central and local roles, in terms of both political and administrative decentralization. Indonesia’s experience is typical: decentralization of staffing authority, but in the context of a tight national staff management framework. This reflects a fact that we need to grasp: decision-makers at both national and local levels have their own legitimacy. National decision-makers have an interest in restraining national public expenditure. Arguably they also have a legitimate interest in equity of treatment across every region (where HR is concerned, this may translate into an interest in ensuring uniform treatment of public servants in every part of the country, including protection against local victimization). Local decision-makers have their legitimate interest in service provision and staffing deployment that reflects local needs.

In this respect, the ‘decentralization’ label is unhelpful, because it leads us to assume that the movement of authority is or should always be downwards and outwards, and that any movement in the other direction is regressive. But in order to balance the national and local interests, we can expect movement in both directions at different times. Thus decentralization in practice means a continual negotiation between national and local levels - and also, in the case of ‘horizontal allocation’, between the different central agencies - about the scope of decision-making and the framework of laws and regulations which governs it. Thus ‘central-local relations’ is a better label than ‘decentralization’ for what governments have been doing in this area.

# **5. New Public Management (NPM)**

In terms of the ‘periodization’ outlined in Table 1, NPM is the reform model which succeeded the public administration model. Of course there was continuity as well as change in the succession. The OECD’s (1995) review of public management developments, published at the high tide of NPM, includes initiatives to improve management of HR, something that the Weberian model also emphasizes in its own way. The essential change, however, was from the public administration doctrine of regular, predictable and rule-governed behavior to behavior that was driven by performance. The public administration doctrine tends to assume that if a sound framework of rules is put in place and public servants are 7