Towards a competent public service
Lionel WIJESIRI
Once upon a time, the public service in Sri Lanka was totally made up
of men and women who possessed a high degree of professionalism.
They had the ability to assist the country’s leadership to set
standards in managing human, financial and material resources to achieve
effective good government. All may not be well nowadays with quite a few
of these institutions, but there is still a fair number of public bodies
that work unflaggingly towards the common good of the people.
Today, the Sri Lankan economy is going through a period of fiscal
challenges and the government is looking at new possibilities which will
allow us to remodel our economy into a modern one. In this process, the
public service has an important role to play to ensure that
sustainability is not jeopardised in the government’s development
programme.
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People - the principal resource of the
public service |
President Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeatedly met public servants on
their home grounds to seek their involvement in the national development
efforts. He has explained changes in policy, procedure revisions, and
new measures to be adopted to re-engineer the transformation of public
services.
Challenges
Our public service comprises over 1.6 million men and women and is
under tremendous pressure to change its methodology of administration
and delivery. In fulfilling this mission, it is facing the challenge of
building the human resource capacity to meet new opportunities and
provide for a strong public service in the future. Persistent and
on-going effort is required to address these challenges.
Many older public servants feel that traditional public service
values and approaches are under siege. Others argue that this is an
opportunity to set a new course for reform which will eventually result
in a streamlined and strengthened public service. Whether this more
optimistic prediction turns out to be accurate will depend on strength
of resolve in building a new public service.
People are the principal resource of the public service, and managing
them well is the key to its ability to cope with new and evolving
demands. More than any other factor, good management of the public
service involves maintaining this human resource with its competencies
and its core values of serving Sri Lankans. No proponent of change wants
to erode these values and undermine the commitment of the public service
to act in the public interest.
The knowledge and commitment of its people are the public service’s
most important assets, which must be rebuilt and updated to keep pace
with changing conditions. This poses a challenge to higher management,
and to the various training and development programmes of the public
service.
Sri Lankans expect the public service to be more open and transparent
in its aims and operations. They expect explanations of what it does,
why, and at what cost. Transparency and openness do not mean ‘reporting
everything’.
Sheer volume would make that impractical for everyone concerned.
Rather, meaningful accountability includes reporting what is relevant
and in the public interest, with other information made accessible on
request to anyone who needs it. Only when citizens and public servants
better understand each other’s situations will it be possible to move
toward an informed dialogue and to make changes that meet common
expectations.
Performance
An effective public service also needs a strong Parliament that can
fairly discuss errors in the context of overall performance. Where rules
and control frameworks are too rigid or out-of-date, Parliament needs to
be informed so that changes can be made. Instead of continuing the long
tradition of exacting accountability for individual errors, a shift of
focus to the nature of corrective action would shift the emphasis to
improvement. Members of Parliament, the public and the media ought to
demand in their scrutiny that this kind of correction occur. Indeed, it
is perhaps the absence of learning rather than the absence of perfection
that most warrants criticism.
The public service, regardless of its size and composition, must
remain contemporary in its approach to management systems and
procedures. Its recruitment, the use of technology, and the push to
administrative efficiency need to be in line with those of other large
private sector organizations in Sri Lanka.
In this context, four areas require particular attention:
Rejuvenating the work force in the public service and ensuring a vibrant
public service for the twenty-first century.
*Removing barriers to the management of people.
*Dealing fairly and effectively with individual shortfalls in the
context of overall performance.
*Demonstrating perseverance in direction and congruence between words
and deeds.
Roles
The public service is part of a larger system of governance and, as
such, it affects and is affected by the other elements of this system.
The government makes public policy and the public service manages its
implementation. In a democracy such as ours, the making of public policy
is the responsibility of the political heads - mobilizing, focussing,
articulating and compromising among the interests of individual Sri
Lankans through the mechanisms of the media, political parties, special
interest groups and the electoral process, all within a framework of
political institutions and traditions.
The major role of the public service is to support the government by
carrying out policy analysis and bringing forward policy proposals
designed to achieve government objectives by translating policy
decisions into action. These actions may be carried out by the public
service itself, other parts of the public sector, or others.
Another role is to deliver a wide range of services, and apply the
regulations that result from public policy decisions. On any given day,
public employees deliver many services, from customs services to
ice-breaking, and from agricultural research to food inspection. These
represent some of the goods and services that Sri Lankans as represented
in Parliament, have decided to provide for themselves through delivery
by the public service.
The third role of the public service is to deal with issues that
never make their way onto the public and political stage. These
administrative practices are developed in the context of the
administrative framework legislated by Parliament.
New concerns
While discussion and debate about the size of public sector and the
range and extent of public services goes on, most Sri Lankans still
expect their government to actively provide critical programmes and
services.
Interestingly, Sri Lankans continue to place considerable trust in
public servants at the same time as they are increasingly distrustful of
its performance overall.
As far as anyone can tell, there will be no letup in the rate of
change and in the intensity of pressure. If anything, the rate of change
will likely increase! For a large and complex organization such as our
public service, building-in the capacity to adjust and keep pace
represents an enormous challenge.
Analysts of the public service in Western countries advocate
efficiency- driven change in the public service, resulting in: (1) a
bold use of market-like mechanisms for those parts of the public sector
that cannot be transferred directly into private ownership; (2)
intensified organizational and spatial decentralization of the
management and delivery of services; (3) a constant emphasis on the need
to improve service quality; and (4) an equally relentless emphasis on
customer satisfaction.
Traditional views
These emerging global views - which are already practiced in some
countries - challenge traditional views of a single public service
dominating the public sector.
They suggest a vision of a public service in which a small corporate
core, a number of quasi-autonomous public service departments, an
arm’s-length public sector, and the private sector work together to
deliver the services that have traditionally been provided by a
centralized public service.
The new approaches raise a number of questions that need attention
and discussion. Some of them are: What kind of public service does Sri
Lanka want? What part of society’s work should be done in or by the
public sector? What set of values should govern the provision of public
goods and services? Should the public service focus exclusively on
efficiency, or also satisfy other societal goals such as, for example,
being representative of the population as a whole in its composition?
What should be the criteria for the migration of public service
functions to the private sector?
These questions about approaches to public service and public
management deserve debate with all stakeholders in order to agree on the
nature of our public service as it evolves toward the future.
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