Public Policy, Training, and Civil Service Reform

There are very few countries of the world that are satisfied with their public bureaucracies and civil service systems. Civil service reform is being discussed in Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America [Ingraham (1996)].1 There are some that are trying to develop a career civil service and others that are fixing the problems of having a career civil service. There are some that are dealing with legacies of past colonial civil service systems while others that are struggling with identifying the role of civil service in a changing political environment. Whatever the case may be, civil service reforms are a topic of interest around the world. Each nation of the world is faced with the challenge of adjusting its domestic and international policies rather rapidly in response to forces of globalisation and technological change [Skogstad (2000) and Farazmand (1999)].2,3 The role of the civil service in economic development, governance, and public service is vital irrespective of the institutional and structural differences across countries. It is not surprising to see in the table below the number of civil service reform programmes funded by the World Bank in different parts of the world. The number of such programmes has significantly increased from 1980 to 2001.