We should realize that such legal initiatives can be subverted in practice. However, we can see the dogged resistance to reform over whole decades in both Sri Lanka and Swaziland (one senior Swazi official predicted at the time of McCourt’s 2003 study that the government would never restore the PSC’s autonomy) as a back-handed but sincere compliment to the efficacy of formal changes such as these.

As with liberty, however, the price of public service reform is eternal vigilance. So it is reassuring in a way to find the Sri Lankan branch of _Transparency International_ and others expressing fears of late that the government elected in 2010 was reverting to the old practices of political interference, which its immediate predecessors had managed to foreswear. Institutional reforms such as those in Box 6 are not a sufficient condition in order to guarantee fairness and efficiency. But the earlier experience of blatantly flawed dispensations in Sri Lanka and Swaziland shows that they are at least a necessary one.

What can we conclude from this discussion of the political economy of public service reform? It is that in the first place, public service reform is not an exclusively technical matter, to be decided by officials. Nor is it entirely a question of administrative capacity. Instead, it is intimately affected by the political context in which it is attempted.

The rather dismal inference that many students of reform have drawn from the political economy studies is that public service reform is the proverbial can of worms. It is true that greater sensitivity to ‘reform readiness’ would have ruled out many reform initiatives. But the more positive inference I prefer to draw is the one suggested by the Swaziland and Sri Lanka examples in Box 5: that sensitivity to politics may open up a window of reform opportunity that has been closed up to now.

# **The Macro-Level: Institutions**<sup>xv</sup>

My Swaziland and Sri Lanka examples have enabled us to kill two birds with one stone, because in illustrating the importance of politics for reform trajectories, they also introduce the importance of institutions. A distinctive feature of public service reform, and of public administration in the context of development activities as a whole, is that it is profoundly shaped by its institutional framework. Moreover, the institutions which govern and regulate the public service are even more important in developing countries than they are in industrialized countries.

This applies very much to the civil and public service commissions in Commonwealth countries, whose Swazi and Sri Lankan manifestations we have just discussed, and their equivalents elsewhere. It is a truism among organization scholars that organizations get the behaviors they reward. If public servants, and potential public servants, see that appointments and promotions are decided by a body which is insulated and committed to excellence, they will have an incentive to study harder for the degree examinations which will equip them for entry, and work harder in the postings that will earn them their promotion.

In this context, when I say ‘institutions’, I also mean ‘laws’. Tanzania’s legal framework for public staff management illustrates this.

# **Box 6. The Public Service Legal Framework in Tanzania**

Although the most distinctive period of Tanzania’s governance history is the _Ujamaa_ (‘self-help’) period after 1965 which turned the country into a one-party state and politicized the public service, power has always been concentrated in the office of the President - before, during and after _Ujamaa_ . The 1989 Civil Service Act<sup>xvi</sup> , enacted in the _Ujamaa_ period but still in force at the time of writing, states that ‘(any) delegation ... shall not preclude the President from himself exercising any function which is the subject of any delegation or authorization.’ Moreover, 19