Daily Times

Since the turn of the 21st century, Pakistan has seen multiple waves of imported administrative reforms. These reforms-driven by a network of local and international consultants, bureaucrats and policymakers- have included, among others, decentralisation, outsourcing, and privatisation. The latest example of such reforms is the introduction of the Medical Teaching Institutions (MTI) Act/Ordinance, which ostensibly aims to “enable improved and modern management of public-sector hospitals.”

Before this, there were the famous private companies created by the previous government. Even before that was a long wave of privatisation and outsourcing of the tasks of public organisations. Packaged and presented in disparate ways by different governments, all these reforms are a part of the same administrative reforms package, known in the academic literature as “new public management.”

This is fundamentally premised on the assumption that the private-sector management practices are the best solution to rectify the ills of the public sector. I label these reforms “imported” because these policies can best be characterised as neocolonial governing practices, which were introduced by our policymakers, simply because they had been adopted in the West without regard to the local contextual factors or their impact on the Western countries.

There are multiple reasons to be sceptical about the success of these reforms, which are increasingly taken for granted by the administrative apparatus in our country. The results of similar reforms have been mixed, at best, around the world.

The most frequently cited reasons for the limited impact of such reforms include the lack of governmental ability to negotiate and monitor contracts, limited accountability, transparency of private provision of public services and the lack of requisite competitiveness among private providers of public services. These problems have led to a wave of re-municipalisation (a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing) in multiple parts of Europe.

Moreover, these reforms have also allowed multiple governments to gradually reduce their role in the provision of social services and present them as a responsibility of the private or non-profit sector.

All this has huge implications for a developing country like Pakistan, where such problems are often augmented due to the limited ability of political, legal and administrative institutions. We, however, have not learned from this experience because most of our policymakers are still looking for easy fixes that can be imported from abroad and copy-pasted in Pakistan. This has never worked in the past and will never work in future.

This thoughtless imposition of management discourse and practices developed in the Western, developed countries upon the lives of those in the developing countries leads to further erosion of democratic accountability and local administrative culture in these regions. More importantly, in such a colonising discourse, any failure and unintended consequence of imported policies is always a fault of the local implementers because the question of flawed foundations of western policies is simply not entertained.

It is critical that our policymakers stop introducing policies simply because they have been introduced by some other country in the West

The blame is always accorded to the “reluctant” bureaucrats, who, we are told, failed to implement such reforms the right way. Even if it brought bureaucrats or consultants from the West, and some of our policymakers have tried that, the results would still be the same. Another important point to keep in mind is that while it is tempting to assume that such reforms can easily be reversed, it is not easy to rebuild the interim decline in the capacity of public organisations to carry out their essential services.

Therefore, it is critical that our policymakers stop introducing policies simply because they have been introduced by some other country in the West. The most important lesson of developmental economics and management research of the last century is that every country is different and importing shiny new policies without regard to the local cultural and administrative context never works. In fact, in many cases, such policies make the situation worse. Therefore, our policymakers and senior bureaucrats must ask more tough questions to those “selling” easy imported solutions to them and try testing such solutions through pilot projects before implementing them across the country. Ultimately, the only way to move forward in a sustainable way is by devising local solutions to governance problems. This can happen only if we trust and enable our people, whether in bureaucracy, academia or the development sector, to work with the public to devise indigenous solutions to our particular issues. There are already multiple examples of our own people-like Zubair Bhatti’s Jhang Model of citizen feedback and Dr Umar Saif’s long list of technology-based solutions-who have devised excellent ways to address to pressing administrative problems. Government can facilitate this process by increasing formal and informal interaction between policymakers, bureaucrats and researchers and by allocating more budgets for indigenous research in the areas of public policy and management. Second-guessing our own people while blindly trusting consultants acting on behalf of international organisations has not worked. It is time to try something new.

The writer is Assistant Professor (Public Policy & Management) at Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences