All bureaucracies have norms that determine how they go about implementing government policy and whether they engage citizens, and in that process shape citizen expectations about the delivery of public services. These engagements are crucial for the effective functioning of a democracy.
That’s why an understanding of what norms guide civil servants in their work, and what effect those norms have, is so important. But it’s an issue that is not discussed as much as it should in SA.
In this regard, research in India offers insights that could prove useful to any of the efforts to rebuild and revitalise the SA public service, which has been weakened in recent years by among others state capture and undue meddling by politicians.
These insights were flagged recently by Yamini Aiyar, president of the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s leading public policy think-tanks. Aiyar writes that little attention has been paid to the consequences of democratic decline for the functioning of everyday bureaucracy and the larger quest for building state capacity.
She references research by political scientist Akshay Mangla, whose work provides an analytical framework for understanding bureaucratic behaviour. Mangla’s research, according to Aiyarthe, is anchored on the understanding that bureaucracies have norms — the informal rules of the game that shape their behaviour.
“Norms shape how administrators interact with each other, with their political masters and, most importantly, citizens.” It is through these interactions that citizen expectations and accountability for public service delivery are shaped.
Aiyar, says Mangla, who has now consolidated his work into a book, has identified two types of bureaucratic norms — legalistic and deliberative norms. The problem with legal norms is that they reward a culture of compliance with rules, hierarchies and procedures, “with little attention to the purpose or indeed to the citizens that bureaucracies serve”.
SA suffers from this, with civil servants being driven to tick boxes of compliance with legislation. Of course, compliance matters, but the scales need rebalancing. Locally, they have been tipped heavily towards compliance, resulting in the description by Indian civil servants of their work as “post officers”. No wonder those public servants who do their work and have not yet been driven off by corruption simply tick the relevant boxes and move on with their lives.
This, as Aiyar describes, is problematic because it results in behaviour that is shaped not in terms of effectiveness and outcomes, but by adherence to rules. “They may mimic well-functioning bureaucracies in their conformity to rules and can effectively perform tasks that require compliance with rules, but they fail when it comes to complex tasks, particularly where citizen engagement, a deeply democratic process, is necessary.”
Locally, municipalities produce volumes of documents in which they scribble all manner of plans and feign public consultation, but they fail miserably at their core function — the delivery of basic services, including supplying residents with electricity and clean water.
That’s because in SA, as in India according to Aiyar, legalistic norms have made “paper-based administrative compliance the core purpose of bureaucratic engagement”, instead of “serving” citizens.
And the citizens bear the burden as they are locked into “a labyrinth of paper, rules, and procedures”, shifting the search for inclusion, justice and participation to the rear. No wonder citizens who depend on government services are growing angrier.
Mangla wrote a paper in 2015 looking at bureaucratic norms and state capacity in two states in India’s Himalayan region, in which he found that Hamachal Pradesh achieved “exceptional performance” in universal primary education while Uttarakhand performed poorly. Both states were implementing the same national policy framework.
The difference was due to each state’s bureaucratic norms. Hamachal Pradesh was guided by “a deliberative model of governance” which encouraged collective action by officials within the state and “the participation of citizens and civic groups”. Uttarakhand followed strict rules and discouraged civic input.
“These findings suggest that bureaucratic norms are an important feature of state capacity, one that ought to receive more scholarly attention. A closer examination of the normative environment in which public agencies operate can also help identify novel strategies for enhancing state capacity, especially when public resources are scarce,” Mangla wrote.
These are useful insights for SA, a country where there is a widening gap between the state and citizens, especially the poorest who are heavily reliant on public services such as education and health. The country needs public servants who are willing to engage citizens on public policy and the delivery of services.
The state’s failure to engage citizens is one of the biggest drivers of citizen protest and loss of confidence in the democracy project.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesman for the finance minister, Treasury and Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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