Effective public service delivery is therefore very important for economic growth. Yet, corrupt practices in Nigerian public sector organizations are commonplace. This IGC study examined how the management practices of public sector bureaucrats affect the quantity and quality of public services delivered. The researchers used data on over projects from the Nigerian Civil Service linking public sector organizations to the individual projects they are responsible for. The country thus represents a leading setting in which to understand the determinants of public service delivery in the developing world.
This IGC study found that management practices that allow a degree of worker autonomy significantly increase project completion rates and project quality. In a recent working paper and event , we ask: how can large public organisations, and political and bureaucratic leaders, design policies, report on results, contract services and recruit in ways that enable, rather than inhibit, effective adaptation?
Building on that work, in this blog we have invited four global and cross-sector perspectives, from development, academia and the donor community to reflect on this question and share their insights on how to nurture more adaptive bureaucracies.
Governments are charged with creating positive outcomes in the world, but the challenges governments face are complex. A crucial lesson complexity can teach us is that outcomes are not delivered by organisations or programmes, they are produced by whole systems.
Complexity shows us that a single organisation cannot be accountable for any one outcome or result. Any social outcome is the product of hundreds of factors working together. Managing by results creates gaming of the system. How, then, can we build real learning so programmes can influence the system towards outcomes? A human, learning, systems approach creates better value for money than a results-based programme. We generate better outcomes, cheaper, because we enable those who know best to keep doing the right thing, even as the right thing constantly changes.
Even before Covid, aid agencies and government bureaucracies recognised that development problems are complex, with no cookie-cutter solutions. This has inspired a proliferation of guidebooks, blogs, and programmes that exhort bureaucracies to adapt, experiment, innovate, tailor solutions to local contexts, think outside the box, and so forth.
Wishing to adapt is not the same as being able to adapt. Experimentation and muddling through may not produce useful solutions. Bottom-up participation may degenerate into shouting matches and gridlock. If the existing paradigm is Complexity 1. Enabling adaptation means not just changing mindsets, but also mechanisms and institutions. Here are three examples:. Adaptive management demands rigour , which means conducting research and delivering evidence.
Adaptive rigour does not mean creating new jargon, fancier charts, or more complicated log-frames. Practitioners should be working with researchers to study what adaptive bureaucracies look like in practice and the mechanisms that enable them. Just as randomised control trials could not take off without a robust research industry on experimental methods, adaptive management cannot be sustained without a research and empirical foundation.
For bureaucracies to adapt, staff need to know they are authorised to adapt and how to adapt. Authorising happens when the culture of an institution makes space for staff to acknowledge that something unexpected has taken place and to respond to it. It also found that granting bureaucrats more autonomy is associated with more effective bureaucracies i.
Surprisingly, researchers found that management practices related to providing incentives or stricter monitoring of employees are associated with less effective bureaucracy. A follow-on IGC project is using the project findings to further design a training programme to improve the productivity of civil service employees and evaluate its impact on participants.
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