Public Officials and Their Institutional Environment : An Analytical Model for Assessing the Impact of Institutional Change on Public Sector Performance
To perform well, public officials must be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome. Their expectations are shaped by their institutional environment. If the rules are not cre...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2000/08/693243/public-officials-institutional-environment-analytical-model-assessing-impact-institutional-change-public-sector-performance http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19797 |
| Summary: | To perform well, public officials must
be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a
relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome.
Their expectations are shaped by their institutional
environment. If the rules are not credible, or are unlikely
to be enforced, of if they expect policies to be
contradicted, or resources to flow unpredictably, results
will be uncertain, so there is little point in working
purposefully. The authors present an analytical framework,
used to design a series of surveys of public officials'
views of their institutional environment, and to analyze the
information generated in fifteen countries. They describe
how survey results help map public sector's strengths,
and weaknesses, and offer an approach to identifying
potential payoffs from reforms. The framework emphasizes how
heterogeneous incentives, and institutional arrangements are
within he public sector. It emphasizes how important it is
for policymakers to base decisions on information (not
generalizations) that suggests what is most likely to work,
and where. In building on the premise that public
officials' actions - and hence their
organization's performance - depend on the
institutional environment in which they find themselves,
this framework avoids simplistic anti-government positions,
bur doesn't defend poor performance. Some public
officials perform poorly, and engage in rent seeking, but
some selfless, and determined public officials, work hard
under extremely difficult conditions. This framework offers
an approach for understanding both bad performance, and
good, and for presenting the results to policymakers in a
format that leads to more informed choices, about public
sector reform. Types of reforms discussed include
strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for
record management, for training, and for recruitment;
ensuring that staff support government policy; preventing
political interference, or micro-management; assuring staff
that they will be treated fairly; and, making government
policies consistent. |
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