political strategies. In Indonesia, the goal was to boost domestic popularity with the public and international credibility with development partners and investors by tackling corruption and exhibiting a responsible approach to the management of public finances following the Asian Financial Crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime. The situation was one of regime change in a context of intense political and economic crisis. In Cambodia, the goal was to support improved budget execution and service delivery in response to higher expectations from citizens, as reflected in the government’s narrow election victory in 2013 and its much reduced majority in local government elections in 2017.

In both cases, new political strategies had to contend with embedded institutional cultures of hierarchy, informal networks, and patronage within the civil service. We use the term “institutional culture” to include ways of working, perceptions of interest and authority and habits of control within a particular state institution. Institutional cultures emerge over time, but are intimately linked to the role of the institution in mediating the relationship between political elites and the broader society. They are thus closely related to shared beliefs among civil servants about the nature of public service and the national interest.

In both Cambodia and Indonesia, FMIS represented a challenge to the status and power of civil servants in influential and prestigious government departments. Consequently, resistance could be expected creating a space of contestation around the reform in which various actors maneuvered to attempt to maximize their influence and promote their interests. Resistance was, in fact, encountered in both cases, but at the time of writing, appears to have been overcome in both cases sufficiently to claim success in the reform. Political economy analysis can shed light on the political dynamics of this zone of contestation, offering insights to change managers attempting to design effective change management tools and strategies appropriate to the reform and the reform context.

The argument of this working paper is that many lessons can usefully be learned by reviewing already implemented processes of change management from a political economy perspective. Furthermore, the transfer of change management techniques from one context to another can be helpful in improving processes of reform and mobilizing support from affected staff and other groups. Comparison of the cases of Cambodia and Indonesia, however, also suggests that change management strategies are limited by local contexts even as they help to transform that context. Change experts working on IFMIS SPAN in Indonesia and then moving to assist with FMIS in Cambodia found that identical strategies could not be rolled out in the Cambodian context, and where similar approaches were used, they did not have the same effect. This was due to some significant differences between the Indonesian and Cambodian contexts.

In this working paper, we have disaggregated change management techniques into five sets of issues: leadership; project design and governance; effective communication; workforce enablement and organizational alignment. In each of these areas, we used political economy analysis to show how the problems that arose with implementation of the project arose from distributions of power and interest among actors in this zone of contestation. Change management tools can intervene in this zone of contestation. Although change managers cannot reconstruct distributions of power and interest, they can affect them at the margins, making some actors relatively more powerful and influencing perceptions of interest of others. Here we draw together some key similarities and differences between the two cases to demonstrate the marginal utility of change management in promoting reform.

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