Can lessons from the UK’s reform experience help others countries to improve the effectiveness of their government?
Reforming government is a messy and imperfect business as it is essentially driven by internal political dynamics and personalities. It has taken decades of stop-start change to transform the UK civil service – and many more reform initiatives failed than succeeded.
So it should be no surprise that efforts by donor funded outside advisers to support public service reform in aid recipient governments have an even more mixed record of success. Transformative reform is invariably achieved over decades, even centuries – dependent on economic diversification and the emergence of a middle class with the capacity and interest to organize and push for reforms.
Politicians and officials across the world frequently look to the UK for practical help to adapt and apply UK reforms to the problems they face – often encouraged by advocacy of global figures like Michael Barber and Tony Blair. But this is accompanied by an unfortunate tendency of too many global institutions and consultancies to prescribe UK and other reform models as the one true solution to be adopted off the shelf regardless of local context and ignorant of the alchemy of the original reform’s success.
As I worked with Caterina Alari on some of the National School of Government International’s projects helping to build the capability of the centres of government in the Kurdistan and Kyrgyzstan we were struck by the similarity of the conclusions we had drawn from our quite different careers supporting and shaping reform in the UK and overseas. Our final report was published by the Institute for Government.
We both believe that leaders of reform in the UK could learn much from the experience of other countries and the rich body of research into development projects. And we are certain there is much more value on offer from the UK experience of reform than the doomed and dispiriting mimicry of particular structures or units.
In 2015 we spent six months engaging with donors, practitioners, overseas recipients, academics and researchers in order to try to crystalize the factors that improve the success rate of donor funded projects on centre of government reform. We wanted to reflect on how best to draw on the UK experience of reform.
We identified three success factors:
Local ownership of the reforms has to be created by making the project relevant to local priorities and problems. This requires time and patience in order to understand the local context and earn the trust and confidence of local leaders. It is essential to work together to understand the problem and develop the best solutions. This is often a slow process of iteration and adaptation.
You have to build capability in the recipient government that will outlast the project. This requires a project to change patterns of work and behaviour. This is best done through a cycle of learning by doing, reflecting on how it went, and then spreading the new ways of working. Too many projects simply substitute external capacity for the lack of the right internal capability – this changes nothing in the medium term.
Careful design of change and implementation is crucial to delivery. The stories, principles, lessons and models from the wide range of UK reforms provide a rich source of stimulus, encouragement, reality checks and warnings for reformers everywhere. But this is best done by matching up practitioners who are steeped in UK reforms with local counterparts to co-develop a local solution that draws selectively and critically on reform lessons from overseas.
Despite widespread acceptance of these factors in the development community it has proved hard to put them into practice. They often appear as no more than a rhetorical wrapper bolted on to the frameworks for business cases, reviews and evaluation that are the norm in the international development business.
These frameworks have to change to reflect the reality that reform is inevitably an incremental, imperfect, episodic, adaptive and opportunistic trajectory which must learn from and build on successive interventions in a way that can’t be planned out precisely in advance. Until this happens the poor track record of centre of government development projects will continue.
And rather than apologise for the overselling of some UK reforms by others, we should respond to strong interest in the UK’s experience by making more use of the energy, ideas and insights that credible and suitably humble UK practitioners can bring to development projects overseas.