twelve months in order to facilitate embedding of the reform following the roll-out. During this time progress began to be made on producing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that would serve as a starting point for rethinking staffing. The SOPs was a streamlined process both inside and outside the system and it provided the system users the required information for operating with the FMIS.

Engagement and communication with stakeholders The existence of many formal statements of support for PFM generally and FMIS in particular by the highest political leaders was interpreted as evidence of “political will” to proceed. Although there is a clear political rationale for reform, this has required complex negotiations between political leaders and groups of civil servants who are powerful political “insiders”. Stakeholder engagement in this context is therefore a highly political and complex affair involving not only formal attendance at project-related events but intensive behind-the-scenes negotiations between political allies that are likely to remain entirely opaque to outsiders, including development partners.

A Stakeholder analysis was conducted in September 2014 to facilitate the change management strategy and activities. However, the analysis took a quite narrowly technical/administrative rather than specifically political view. Stakeholders were identified in three groups: key influencers, users, and “need to know”. These were identified entirely from within the MEF and provincial treasuries. Interviews were conducted with ministry leaders including the Minister and a range of directors, deputy directors and officers across the Ministry, and resulted in a very inward-looking understanding of the purpose of the reform. This makes sense from the point of view of training, but it reinforces a top-down, administrative conception of the motivations for change which over-emphasizes the internal environment of the MEF at the expense of the external political strategy that the government was attempting to pursue through better PFM management.

In the Cambodian context, there are few organized actors working to promote public advocacy on issues to do with budgeting, public spending and corruption (Public Expenditure Review 2015). This implies little direct political pressure, beyond a broad electoral imperative about quality of services, to show publicly that the reform is proceeding according to plan. This is an important contrast with the situation in Indonesia, where action against corruption and to promote the integrity of public finances is significantly higher on the political agenda and has organized constituencies within civil society and the media working to promote day to day action within government on the issue.

A Change Readiness Assessment (CRA) concluded that in this situation, the lack of consensus within the MEF over how far business practices were going to change had produced a great deal of uncertainty among the future users of the system with CRA score clustered above 3 points in which the score of 1 is positive perception and the score of 5 is negative perception (Figures 2 and 3). Three different versions of the business processes were produced which caused confusion, particularly among provincial treasuries whose existing IT competencies were far lower than in the central MEF.

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