have preferred it to be recentralized, because they felt vulnerable to undue pressure or even victimization from the local politicians who were now their bosses.

_Sources:_ Evans (2003); Francis and James (2003); Turner _et al._ (2009).

We can discern a pattern in the above examples, and in other countries such as India and Mexico which Evans reports on: decentralization of decision-making to locally elected bodies, but with the scope to make independent decisions severely constrained by continuing central control of money and of the legal and procedural frameworks within which staffing (and other) decisions are made; and by a concern among public employees that there should be a level playing field across all the local bodies.

# **Administrative Decentralization and HR**

Even where there is no question of political decentralization of a particular service such as education or policing, we see the same global trend towards pushing decisions, including HR decisions, down the public administrative hierarchy. As we shall see in the next section, delegation is one of the three management imperatives driving the so-called New Public Management model. Yet just as with political decentralization, the reality on the ground is of a strong continuing central input in staffing decisions at lower levels. Generally speaking, public service management remains highly centralized in developing countries. Most HR decisions were taken centrally in five out of seven countries in Africa and Asia studied by McCourt (2006), and in one of the other two they were delegated only as far as the top level in line ministries.

There are good, bad and interesting reasons for this pattern. The good reason is that governments have mostly decided that they can control the pervasive patronage pressures more easily from a single central point rather than a multitude of local decision points. That is why Nepal’s government in the 1990s was wise to resist a donor proposal, made at the high tide of the New Public Management (see Section 5 below), to delegate HR decisions to its line ministries (McCourt, 2001a). The bad reason is that central bureaucracies are loath to surrender power, even over trivial matters. McCourt cites two examples of this in his 2006 study: central permission was needed in Mauritius to change the walking allowance paid to forest guards; and, in Tanzania, to change the design of official forms. The interesting reason is that there may be a cultural preference for central management, as in Malaysia, a country whose tendency to manage from the top down has deep historical roots. Patronage pressures are mostly kept under control there, but line ministry HR staff have still tended to be happy for the center to make their decisions for them.<sup>vii</sup>

# **Distribution of Functions**

When reformers discuss where to put responsibility for human resource management in the structure of government, a major element in many public service reform programs, they often do so in terms of how much authority the center should have relative to line departments and agencies. But governments also need to decide on the appropriate division of responsibility between the central departments and agencies themselves. In many of the countries that have not devolved responsibility to line ministries and agencies (see below), the respective roles of government ministries look broadly like this.

**Table 2: Responsibility for HR in Government Agencies**<sup>**viii**</sup>

|**Agency**|**Functions**|
|---|---|
|Office of the Prime Minister/President|overall government policy|
|Ministry of Finance|pay and pensions|
|Ministry for the Public Service|deployment and conditions of service|
|Public Service Commission|appointment, promotion, transfer and discipline|

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