is not simply a technology upgrade. It also involves the transformation of working practices, with enormous amounts of basic clerical work rendered redundant, allowing opportunities for a more analytical or forensic approach to accounting and budgeting. However, this implies a change in working practices, in the types of skills and competencies required, in the kinds of interactions and activities each worker will engage in on an average day, and in hierarchies of control.

Because of the level of resistance to wholesale transformations that fundamentally redistribute resources and power, often these can only be achieved in conditions of crisis, when leaders are under enormous pressure to take radical decisions quickly. However, in the absence of crisis, incremental change may be possible. Once again, political economy analysis can provide information on the distribution of pressures for change and for resistance to change, as well as a range of outcomes in between such as manipulation or negotiation of change. This can assist in the development of an organizational alignment strategy, by analyzing the political sensitivity of different aspects of change. For example, it might be expected that changes that involve mass lay-offs of staff will be highly politically sensitive, whereas changes that reduce the need to require staff to work unpaid overtime will be less so.

## Workforce enablement

Workforce enablement is used in the change management literature largely to mean training in effective use of and engagement with new systems. However, in line with the analysis here, the term can also be viewed more broadly as representing a level of confidence and familiarity with new processes, systematic learning, and an acceptance of new ways of doing things as appropriate and valid means of achieving common goals. Adequate training, particularly for lower level staff who will have to use the system, combined with provision of monetary or status incentives linked to the acquisition of new skills are important in the narrower sense of the term, while gaining familiarity with new ways of working requires further attention to realigning institutional culture in a manner that can create new relationships and modes of interaction which facilitate new attitudes on the part of staff.

This paper uses the combination of political economy analysis with change management techniques in these five key areas to explain the different outcomes of two FMIS projects that were recently implemented in Indonesia and Cambodia. The two countries shared similar governance problems in the early 2000s, but quite different political economy contexts, giving rise to distinct political strategies and institutional cultures. The introduction of similar FMIS programs unfolded very differently in the two cases, with clear implications for the way that political economy and change management can be folded together to provide useful practical guidance to reformers in a fast-changing situation on the ground.

# **2. Case Study Analysis: Cambodia**

## 2.1 The Political Economy Context of State-building  and PFM Reform  in Cambodia

Cambodia is a post-conflict state whose current institutions emerged quite recently in a context of high levels of violence and low levels of human development. The current political settlement and state apparatus in Cambodia have their antecedents in the aftermath of the catastrophic levels of death and destruction unleashed upon Cambodia 10