Reclaiming ‘publicness’ of public service

What matters most to a common person — is it the stock markets; or, strategic engagements; or, global trends in economy and investment? Maybe not, as what matters the most to the general public is their day-to-day life and factors playing critically at the ground level to either make their lives easy or difficult, depending on how good the governance is. Unfortunately, the issues faced by developing countries are neither simple nor few, and they remain underdeveloped caught in a never-ending vicious cycle of problems — leading to one another within the given constraints.

There have been efforts made by researchers in various fields to categorise such issues according to the level of importance attached to them, but a unified consensus could never be achieved. However, it is generally believed that one common factor that could address most of the problems across the areas critical for economic and social development is governance, or better termed good governance.

Is it a folly; or, is it something really achievable, and does it really matter?

Governance is basically the way devised for making decisions at a societal level and the allied processes defining authority and accountability.

Authority — decision-making — accountability; this troika is enough to drag the cart of good governance, covering almost the whole scenario. Clear authority lines and just and transparent decision-making checked through an accountability mechanism should be sufficient to produce good governance, and resultantly happy and satisfied citizens and progressive societies. Thus, no doubt governance, devised in the most implicit but effective manner, should be the first and the foremost focus for the policymakers dealing with public policies.

Modern literature on governance has proved it time and again that uncontrolled power and lack of accountability result in reducing the “publicness” of public service — making the governance machinery indifferent to the needs of public. To increase the level of publicness in public organisations, there were a number of attempts made throughout the world under the umbrella of New Public Management towards the end of the last century. However, most of these reform efforts could not achieve the primary objective of sustaining an efficient public sector with improved service quality. This misconstrued attempt of businesslike improvement in the public service organisations resulted in discharging publicness from the public service by weakening the most important chain linking authority, decision-making and accountability. This reform pattern instead of contributing towards the enhanced impact of public service delivery as was ambitiously expected made the identity of publicness vague and vanish with time.

The businesslike reforming of the public sector, overwhelmed by the tall claims associated with the approach, lost the vital significance of public-private distinction, adversely affecting the exclusion of citizens from public sector services. This not only resulted in increased indifference from public due to the lost ownership but also led to a drop in the confidence in institutional integrity and representativeness. The diminishing public trust in public governance institutions also impacted the level of commitment of public service providers, who used to take pride in their jobs that ultimately perished because of the reduced acknowledgment on the part of public and the apprehensions linked with the reforms — overshadowed with the fear of retrenchment. In case of Pakistan, it is strongly believed that improving governance of public service delivery can prove to be a single-pill prescription for most of the ills in which it has been caught for decades.

Learning from the experience of other countries, there is a need that Pakistan design focused strategies supported by an enabling policy framework. Adequate efforts must be made to avoid getting trapped in the already failed models of governance while looking for new and indigenous ones — and, one such framework could be interactive governance.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2018.

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