The culture of bureaucracy and the need for reforms Prijono Tjiptoherijanto  ;  A Professor of Economics at the University of Indonesia, Depok, West Java

JAKARTA POST,  17 Januari 2014

                                                                                                                       

The bureaucracy has a structure that breeds its own administrative culture. Incoming political leadership often reacts to the bureaucracy.  It inherits it and institutes personnel purges or reorganization or both, either to cleanse the old system and reorient it to the needs of the new dispensation or to reshape the administrative culture and values in facilitating targeted policy and program objectives.  Consequently, a new political order brings its own political culture to the regime-bureaucracy relationship. As the bureaucracy accommodates and eventually trusts the new regime, an administrative culture supportive of the political leadership ensues. The biggest hurdle to administrative reforms, however, appears to be the role of politicians in controlling the bureaucracy. Political leaders in a party-run polity are unlikely to appreciate the importance of a politically neutral civil service.  They also may not be adequately restrained from pursuing extraneous goals in and through the bureaucracy. Indulgence by dominant-party politicians has also resulted in widespread political interference in administrative decisions and the politicization of bureaucratic decision-making. Another factor that contributes to the success of administrative reform is the role of leaders. The implementation of change in public services requires highly persistent and visionary leaders. Therefore, there has to be quality leadership that will provide guidance and inspiration for the whole community, especially in the bureaucracy as the machine of government.  Leadership is thus a necessary but insufficient condition for institutionalizing public-sector reforms. Leadership is the key element in reforming the office and, in a larger sense, in achieving and engaging a performance-driven civil service within a challenging and globalizing world. Good governance occurs not only when politicians are honest and accountable, but also when civil servants are efficient and productive. The quality of governance is largely dependent on the quality of people who run it. A government maintained by responsible and highly competent individuals who are motivated by a strong desire to improve the lives of others, can ensure a government that truly works for the people.  Most problems in government are said to be substantiated by the lack of this basic quality of service. Sadly, the reputation of public officials speaks for itself in almost all of the developing countries in ASEAN. As for administrative reform, or so-called “governance reform”, administrative reform is directed toward the “trust deficit”. The “trust deficit” can be reduced only by creating a government that is efficient and also just.  In the United States, this paradigm stimulated rethinking about what government was and how it should function. Among the products were two theories of government administration which surfaced under two great presidents. One is the “minimal state” role, a form of administrative strategy used by the Reagan administration, whereas the other involved “reinventing government” during the Clinton Administration. The minimal state theory is similar to the school of thought that has its roots in the work of Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman and draws intellectual sustenance from the work of William A. Niskanen, Gordon Tullock, Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan and other members of the school of public choice.  During the Reagan administration, minimalism was implemented through various means that sought diminished expectations of government; budgetary restraints and centralized decision making; a leaner and more responsive political establishment; and a focus on a few objectives of overriding natural importance. Reinventing government, on the other hand, took its inspiration from the experience of practitioners such as David Osborne, a journalist, and a former city manager, Ted Gaebler. Ideas posted by Osborne and Gaebler had the enthusiastic endorsement of president Clinton when in 1993 he requested vice president Al Gore to review the performance of the federal government of the United States of America.  The purpose of the review, as the title of the report that was submitted in the same year indicated, was to create a government that was result oriented, worked better and cost less.  The report noted that only 20 percent of the American people trusted the federal government to act correctly most of the time. To reduce this “trust deficit” then became an important objective of the administration at that time. In spite of the strategic differences between the two reform movements, there was a common theme, the urge to de-bureaucratize government administration.  Several innovative public programs that broke free of the constraint of bureaucratic procedures were introduced.  In order to understand the de-bureaucratizing agenda in these two reform movements, comparison between them with regard to four dimensions of public administration namely : purpose, personnel, organization and management procedures, was required.  These dimensions addressed the questions of why, who, what and how public administration ought to be conducted. At the risk of over simplification these questions provide a sense of the potential for and content of the de-bureaucratization agenda. The de-bureaucratization movement as an administrative reform is more than a political act.  It is an act of cultural change, reflecting and challenging basic social values.  As James Q. Wilson has commented, “The way in which a bureaucracy operates cannot be explained simply by knowing its tasks and the economic and political incentives that it confronts. Culture makes a difference.” Building trust in government as a way to strengthening the administrative culture is an ongoing process, where complacency is unwelcome.  However, since this process should be taken, the following recommendations should be implemented: A clear definition of the power of different levels of government to enable better coordination and policy cohesiveness between actors in bureaucracy; additional attention to incentive and pay structures within the civil service; and continuing support to the fight against corruption. In each of these objectives, the role of leadership will be key in building the credibility of new reforms, providing the populace with an overall vision of a future in which government earns and fully merits citizens’ confidence, and helping to commit different socioeconomic actors and resources to this long-term goal. ●