Civil Service Reform and Performance Management in Ghana and Zambia Since 1990
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Working paper Civil service reform and performance management in Ghana and Zambia since 1990 Martin J. Williams Liah Yecalo-Tecle August 2019 When citing this paper, please use the title and the following reference number: S-41438-GHA-1 Civil Service Reform and Performance Management in Ghana and Zambia Since 1990 Martin J. Williams and Liah Yecalo-Tecle August 2019 Abstract Many public sector reforms in Africa have sought to improve efficiency by linking civil servants’ performance to incentives. However, there is relatively little systematic evidence about the design, implementation, and effectiveness of these performance management reforms. We address this gap by documenting the patterns of all performance-oriented civil service reform since 1990 in Ghana and Zambia. We compile timelines and details of over two dozen reforms through 60 interviews with civil servants in each country and an extensive review of project reports, academic studies and government archives, including multiple efforts to implement incentivized annual appraisal and performance contract systems in each country. The pattern revealed is stark: there are no examples of governments successfully linking individual performance to meaningful rewards or sanctions. However, we also highlight ways in which some of these schemes have achieved positive results through measurement and dialogue - even in the absence of hard incentives - and discuss implications for the design of future performance management reforms. We relate this to recent microeconomic evidence on the use of monitoring and incentives in the public sector, as well as evidence from public administration research in OECD countries. ___________________ Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Corresponding author email: [email protected]. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the International Growth Centre and GCRF-HEFCE. We are indebted to conversations, comments, and support from Nana Agyekum-Dwamena, Augustina Akonnor, Kunda-Chibale Chima, Dennis Chiwele, James Dzansi, Yanilda Gonzalez, Shivani Haria, Mai Hassan, Marja Hinfelaar, Dan Honig, Anand Rajaram, Daniel Rogger, Twivwe Siwale, Henry Telli, seminar participants at Oxford and MPSA 2019, staff of Ghana’s Public Records and Archives Department, to excellent research assistance from Bashar Hobbi and Allan Kasapa, and to and the numerous individuals who generously gave their time to be interviewed. This project was approved by the Blavatnik School of Government Ethics Committee (SSD/CUREC1A/BSG_C1A-19-02). Any remaining faults are the authors’ responsibility. 1 “The newly articulated pay policy should as much as possible, aim at explicitly linking pay to performance, signalling a major change in the incentive system and in performance expectations. Rewards and penalties are both vital for a well functioning incentive regime …Meaningful performance incentives are a must.” -A Medium-Term Strategy for Enhancing Pay and Conditions of Service in the Zambian Public Service, Theodore Valentine (2002, 92) “Activities:…Introduce a performance-related pay based on a well-designed performance contracting system adopted by the government.” - National Public Sector Reform Strategy, Government of Ghana (2017, 31) 1. Introduction The idea that a lack of individual incentives is at the core of poor performance has been widely taken for granted by reformers working in and with civil services in Africa. Performance management policies to operationalize such incentive schemes have been at the core of many of the efforts at civil service reform that have taken place since the late 1980s. In Ghana, for example, nearly every significant reform from 1987 (World Bank 1987) to the present (Government of Ghana 2017) has emphasized the need to link individuals’ performance to rewards and sanctions. This carrot-and-stick approach to improving performance is intuitive, but despite all these efforts to introduce the performance-linked pay, the continued demand for such systems suggests that past reforms have been less than successful. How often have governments tried to put such reforms into practice? How often have they succeeded? And why? This study addresses this gap by documenting the patterns of performance-oriented civil service reform since 1990 in two countries that have undertaken numerous such reforms: Zambia and Ghana. Individual performance management reforms such as staff appraisals and performance contracts have been among the most common such reforms, with each country having attempted to introduce such reforms on several occasions over the span of 30 years. While the details vary across schemes, they share a common ideal-type: at the start of each year, individuals agree on objectively measurable targets with their supervisor; these are then assessed at the end of the year; and based on their measured performance, individuals are rewarded or sanctioned through means such as pay, career progression, and/or contract renewal. Yet across all these efforts, we observe no successful examples of incentives being systematically and sustainably linked to individual performance. We also observe similar mechanisms at work in each case. Whereas performance management systems are supposed to 2 create a self-reinforcing annual cycle of meaningful target-setting, objective assessment, and differentiated incentives that reward good performers and sanctions bad performers, we observe the opposite: targets are often vague, incomplete, and de-linked from individuals’ actual responsibilities; individual assessments are almost always uniformly positive; and rewards and sanctions are therefore almost never applied. To explain why this cycle is negatively rather than positively self-reinforcing, we show how each step of the standard model of performance management makes strong assumptions about individual behaviour and organizational context. These assumptions rarely match the actual context, so the design of performance management systems is internally coherent but ill-suited to the context. However, we also show that these performance management systems do have some benefits, despite the absence of the incentives which are supposed to be at their core. Interviews with senior leadership and rank-and-file civil servants alike provide evidence that the mere acts of discussing responsibilities, setting targets, and assessing performance help them do their jobs better – even without the associated carrots and sticks. Since the threat of incentives undermines the extent to which officers are willing to engage openly and honestly in target- setting and assessment, this suggests that governments paradoxically may be able to create more impactful performance management systems by letting go of the idea that they should be linked to incentives. Empirically, for each country, we compile comprehensive timelines of all large-scale civil service reform episodes undertaken during this time period by both governments and donors. This allows us to examine patterns of reform both within and across countries, rather than relying on isolated case studies of individual reforms. To do so, we draw on five types of sources: 1) 177 government and donor reports on specific reforms; 2) 113 academic studies, most of which are case studies of single reform episodes or analyses of a specific aspect of public management in one of the countries; 3) interviews with 27 individuals who were directly involved in designing or implementing each of the reforms, such as government and donor officials as well as consultants; 4) interviews with 31 rank-and-file civil servants who have not been directly involved in reform implementation about how the measures introduced by these reforms have affected their work, in order to triangulate the impact claims of reformers and official documents; and 5) in Ghana, original scanned material from public records and archives of internal governmental plans, discussions, and reports. This rich array of data allows us to examine the mechanisms of designing and implementing civil service reform in unusual breadth and depth. This study complements a growing body of quantitative studies on incentives and monitoring in low- and middle-income countries (e.g. Duflo et al 2012; Khan et al 2015; various in Finan et al 2015). These studies are mostly focused on frontline personnel such as teachers, health workers, and tax collectors, instead of the middle- and upper-level core policymakers on which this study focuses (with Rasul and Rogger [2018] and Rasul, Rogger, and Williams [2019] as exceptions). However, a theme in this literature is that governments often fail to fully implement incentive pay arrangements for political and administrative reasons (Banerjee et al 2008; Dhaliwal and Hanna 2017; Bold et al 2018), contributing to a call for greater study of the problems of implementation and scale-up. The scale-up of such incentive systems occurs through large system-wide reforms such as the ones we study, hence the reform process is itself an important object of study. The repeated failure of reforms in Zambia and Ghana to implement performance-linked incentives over 30 years suggests that these challenges are, if anything, even more severe for core civil servants than for frontline personnel, possibly 3 because such personnel are more politically influential and visible and their performance is harder to measure objectively. Our paper draws on and contributes to the body of research on performance management and civil service reform in Ghana (Dodoo 1997;