Clientelism in the Public Sector : Why Public Service Reforms May Not Succeed and What to Do About It
The World Development Report 2017 Governance and the Law (World Bank, 2017) highlights the intimate connection between the effectiveness of policy reforms and governance. The Report argues that power asymmetries play an important role in ensuring t...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/797771489498533549/Clientelism-in-the-public-sector-why-public-service-reforms-may-not-succeed-and-what-to-do-about-it http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26257 |
| Summary: | The World Development Report 2017
Governance and the Law (World Bank, 2017) highlights the
intimate connection between the effectiveness of policy
reforms and governance. The Report argues that power
asymmetries play an important role in ensuring that policy
reforms are credible and overcome collective action
problems; with one particular manifestation being
clientelism. Further, it notes that in order to expand the
set of implementable policies, there is need to change the
policy arena by: (a) changing incentives; (b) reshaping
preferences; and (c) increasing the contestability of the
decision-making process. In this background paper, The
author focusses on how power structures affect incentives
for policy reforms and ultimately outcomes in the context of
public service delivery. Here, It have a particular power
structure in mind, namely when public servants themselves
hold power. In many developing countries (and beyond),
public servants are not just the agents tasked with
delivering services by the principal (the clients of the
service, usually represented by politicians), they are also
elites, in the sense that they can have direct influence on
policy design and implementation. This has implications for
the quality of public services: if the main purpose of the
relationship between principal and agent is not to deliver
quality public services, but rather to share rents accruing
from public office, then service delivery outcomes are
likely to be poor. Breaking such an equilibrium may be
difficult and successful policy reform needs to take these
kind of power constraints into consideration. In the first
part make the case that public servants – aside from
delivering services – may capture rents in a multitude of
ways : through the allocation of jobs, through above market
wages, and through low performance on the job, including
with absenteeism or moonlighting. This research also
suggests why public sector reform may be so difficult: if
rent-sharing arises as part of a tacit agreement between
politicians and public servants in which rents are
transferred in exchange for political support, then any
reform that tries to make public servants more accountable
and reduce their rents will likely be seen as reneging on
such an agreement and be met with opposition.In the second
part of the paper, we review research that has focused on
making public servants more accountable. This, mainly
experimental literature, usually takes the political power
constraints as given, and highlights the importance of
information and the identity of those monitoring the public
servant. We discuss to what extent such local reforms can be successful. |
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