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Can the Civil Service Be a Key to Progress in Bangladesh?

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Can the Civil Service Be a Key to Progress in Bangladesh? 71493 Public Disclosure Authorized IS CLASS I TOP TIER? Public Disclosure Authorized Can the Civil Service Be a Key to Progress in Bangladesh? Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized CONTENTS SUMMARY .........................................................................................................................................i 1. THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A KEY TO PROGRESS ............................................................................. 1 2. CIVIL SERVICE REFORM’S POOR TRACK RECORD ....................................................................3 The government did not implement the recommendations of reform commissions ............................... 3 Elected and appointed executive were averse to risks and faced no penalties for inaction .................... 4 Earlier reform initiatives focused on process rather than outcomes ....................................................... 6 The driver of change was neither highly placed nor close to the center ................................................. 7 3. EMPHASIZING MERIT IN CIVIL SERVICE MANAGEMENT ......................................................... 10 Merit must be restored to its central position ........................................................................................ 11 Merit must be incorporated into affirmative action .............................................................................. 12 Merit must be championed by the Public Service Commission ........................................................... 15 Merit must guide Class I officers’ promotion and career management ................................................ 16 Merit can be built through training ....................................................................................................... 17 Compromising merit and competition can lead to unintended consequences ...................................... 18 4. BUILDING A STRONGER LEGAL FRAMEWORK, MORE INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT, AND BETTER TOOLS FOR MANAGING PERFORMANCE ..................................................................... 20 A sound legal framework must be established to manage the civil service .......................................... 20 The Public Service Commission must be free from political micromanagement ................................. 21 The civil service examination is outdated and needs revamping .......................................................... 23 The annual confidential report is not useful for managing performance and career progression ......... 24 Promotions are not use effectively to reward good performance ......................................................... 26 5. NEXT STEPS ..............................................................................................................................28 Forewarned is forearmed ...................................................................................................................... 28 A program of action will show the way forward .................................................................................. 29 1. ................ 35 2. The Bangladesh ................................................................................ 36 3. The .................................................................................... 38 4. ...................................................................................................... 40 5. ............................................................................................................................... 42 6. ............................................................................................................. 46 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 48 SUMMARY 1. A country’s civil service is a tool the government can use to convert its manifesto into results. Bangladesh needs a more effective and efficient civil service to move the country toward its goals for social and economic development. Improving the performance of the civil service and more effectively using the latent talents of its officers are the keys to progress. 2. The strengths and weaknesses of Bangladesh’s civil service are well known because the government has set up at least ten different committees and commissions in the past 25 years to study the problems. Although their recommendations have been very similar, few decisive actions have resulted. The objective of this study is to convince government officials and their development partners that doing more of the same will not create a modern civil service, capable of making policies and delivering services relevant in the twenty-first century. This report is intended to shape how the government builds the political will and administrative capacity to support ongoing and future reforms, such as the proposed clustering of ministries and establishment of a senior civil service. 3. The report begins by examining the scope of previous civil service reform initiatives in Bangladesh and the reasons why their track record has been so poor. Despite many diagnoses and recommendations from government-appointed commissions and development partners’ reports, progress has faltered for four main reasons. First, successive governments have not acted upon the recommendations and development partners have not followed up on the recommendations’ implementation. Second, reforms have not been propelled forward because there were strong vested interests in the status quo and little demand for the changes that remained unimplemented. Third, when initiatives were in fact started, they were considered to be an end in themselves rather than a step toward achieving the higher objective of an efficient and effective civil service. The government’s follow through with its public administration training policy for Class I officers illustrates this characteristic. Although the government announced the policy in 2003, it was not followed by an implementation plan containing details of costs and staff resources. Finally, even when the government decided to act upon recommendations and initiate reform, there was no driver of change—individual or unit—placed highly enough to carry the reform through. Currently, all civil service reform initiatives are the responsibility of the Ministry of Establishment, which has important governmentwide human resource functions but is neither strategically placed nor perceived as politically powerful. The discharge of routine functions takes up so much of its resources that change management is not among the ministry’s priority tasks. A high-placed reform unit, unencumbered with day-to-day personnel management, and working with other central management agencies, would help drive the reform process forward. 4. This investigation focuses on civil service management practices, such as recruitment, training, performance evaluation, promotion, and career management. The rules and practices guiding these elements of personnel management most directly affect civil servants’ behavior and their approach to their tasks. For Bangladesh, with its career-based civil service, examining civil service management is particularly important because the behavior patterns induced by these rules and practices will be more permanent than in position-based systems, where officers come and go and where the entire civil service could theoretically be replaced by a new set of officials with desired skills and behavior. 5. Other aspects of the civil service, such as its architecture, size, budgetary impact, and service delivery mechanisms—to name a few—are beyond the scope of this study, although they are ultimately important for civil service reform. Especially, compensation is central to civil servants’ incentives, but because the topic was covered in a governance note delivered to the government in 2005 it is not addressed directly here. Although Bangladesh’s civil service comprises nearly a million officials, this study is deliberately restricted to a small group—the Class I officers, who make up only 10 percent of the civil service. This group is at the tip of the civil service pyramid; it has the potential to function as the spearhead of reform. 6. The study makes two major recommendations: Give additional emphasis to merit in managing the civil service. Focus on the fundamentals of civil service reform, where tinkering at the edges has been unproductive, by building a stronger legal framework, more independent oversight, and better tools for managing performance. Emphasizing merit in civil service management 7. The merit principle, which entails the appointment of the best person for any given job based on explicit rules that are publicly understood and consistently applied, is central to civil service management, especially in a career-based service such as Bangladesh’s. Meritocratic civil service systems tend to promote commitment and integrity among public servants and are associated with lower corruption and better performance. But merit and competition have been sidelined in some aspects of Class I officers’ management. Currently, less than half (45 percent) of the total Class I recruitment is based on merit; the rest is distributed among districts according to their populations—besides a quota of 10 percent for women. The recruitment quotas have changed a few times since they were first laid down in 1972. 8. Recruitment quotas are not unique to Bangladesh. Many governments use them
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