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Building trust in government

DEMOCRACY has become a near universal aspiration of the people, and today there are more countries that claim to be democratic or aspire to it than at any previous time in history. We aspire to democratic government because a government that reflects the popular will is better equipped to advance the aspiration of the people and create an even playing field that enables citizens to develop their full human creativity. It is also more likely to respect rule of law and human rights, ensure freedom of expression and religion, give minorities an effective voice in the governance of their society, and respect the diversities and particularities of the different communities. And because such governments are popularly and freely elected by the citizens, they have a popular mandate and enjoy the confidence and trust of the people.

Yet at the very moment when democracy appears to have triumphed, there are grave dangers undermining the very future of democratic governments. The disillusionment with governments in general and with democracy in particular is widespread. Governments in both developed and in developing countries, even where their mandates are periodically renewed through popular elections, are losing the trust of their citizens. Surveys increasingly show that people do not trust their governments; that people seem to have lost confidence in the political and electoral processes; the number of people casting their votes is dwindling; politicians and bureaucrats are held in low esteem; in more cases than not the voters are using their power of ballot to throw out incumbent governments for their perceived failures; and that the best and the most idealistic young women and men are no longer attracted to government services. The perception of government corruption around the world is increasing.

While a degree of wariness and scepticism about the government is healthy for democracy, its absence and erosion signals danger. All evidence indicates that the trust in the US federal government has declined steadily in the last four decades. In the 1960s well over three quarters of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing. But the handling of the Vietnam War and the subsequent Watergate scandal eroded that trust, and by the end of the century only a quarter of the Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing. The story in other countries is not very different. And not only have people lost confidence in their governments but it seems that they are also distrustful of other public institutions. This is dramatically illustrated in the United States.

Public confidence has dropped from two thirds to one-third in universities; from half to a one-fifth in the private sector companies; from three-quarters to less a third in the doctors; and even the media – the watch dog of democracy – has become the handmaiden of corporate America and appears to have lost public esteem. Its support has dropped from a low of 29 per cent to an all time low of 14 per cent. A recent poll reveals that the United States Congress enjoys even less confidence than arguably the most unpopular president in the history of the country.

The erosion of popular confidence in the government has important consequences for our society and it is not always fully grasped. For a start it denudes the government of its legitimacy and therefore hinders its ability to govern. It paves the way for demagogues and authoritarian rulers, and not surprisingly military intervention (which at the turn of the century many believed had become a thing of the past) has once again surfaced in a number of countries. In extreme circumstances the lack of trust in government spurs secessionist tendencies and the break up of the country. The importance of trust in recent years has become greater as governments depend on all sectors of the society – the civil society, market and government bureaucracy – for the co-production of governance.

Institutional confidence and regime stability are connected: the willingness of the public to provide resources through taxes, the willingness of bright people to enter government service, and voluntary compliance with the laws. And if governments cannot perform the people will become more distrustful and dissatisfied. The confidence in government is also an indicator of political stability and it matters for all sorts of practical reasons. Cynicism about the political process and the elected government reduces citizen participation and adversely impacts the quality of democracy. Citizen engagement in public policy debate is essential to ensure accountability and safeguard liberties. And most crucially, political stability is essential for the provisioning of public goods, the creation of educational institutions to build human resources, and for science and technology to flourish. In a global economy confidence in government is essential for attracting capital and foreign investors, and an assurance of the protection of intellectual property.

Equally of concern is the control and manipulation of the media for partisan politics. Free press and media is traditionally the watchdog of democracy and good governance. Today the media – at least the print media – in most countries of the world is by and large free. But that freedom often boils down to the freedom of the owners of the press. Instead of holding the government and public leaders accountable, the media invariably takes sides and manipulates information through biased reporting and analysis. What was once the watchdog of democracy is now fast becoming the single biggest threat to the integrity of democracy and is adding to popular skepticism about the government.

It is perhaps likely that some of the claims of the erosion of trust in governments are exaggerated, but there is little doubt that many of the complaints are not without sound basis. In most countries the citizens have little say in the period between elections, and there are few, if any, mechanisms for their voices to be heard in the formulation of public policy. It has been claimed, and with much truth, that in these societies the rulers and the ruled may live in the same country but they traverse in different universes. Notwithstanding electoral pledges the priorities of the public are often not reflected in the policies of the government. While each vote is equal in a democracy, the reality of campaign finance ensures that the influence of the campaign funder and lobbyist prevails over those of the citizens. And again while it is true that citizens are free to vote, the choice of those for whom they can vote has often been determined by a process in which the candidate’s wealth or access to wealth plays a determining factor.

Democratic institutions are also under stress. Historically, democratic institutions and processes evolved and developed in homogeneous societies and the central democratic tenet of majority rule based on one person one vote worked well. But in plural and divided multinational societies with deep community and ethnic cleavages, the rule of the majority often precludes the effective participation of minority groups. One vote one person often leads to the winner takes all and the tyranny of the majority. The minority groups who feel excluded from power and decision-making often resort to extra-constitutional mechanisms. One size no longer fits all. Democratic government must thus reinvent itself to meet the needs of plural societies, diverse contexts and the developing societies. The real challenge is to retain the core democratic principle of one person one vote and at the same time adapt the existing practices while creating new institutions, instruments and political processes to meet the needs of the changed realities of plural societies.

In the last three decades the centrality of effective governance has been better understood both by the policy community and scholars. The entire success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is premised upon building adequate governance capabilities without which the attainment of development goals and the reduction of poverty will remain an illusory goal. To be sure in the past couple of decades the governments have responded to the challenges by what is popularly referred to as ‘reinventing government’. The obvious recognition that ‘government’ and ‘governance’ is not the same thing helped to reinvent or reengineer the way government functions. The re-conceptualization of government has enabled us to conduct governance in ways very different from the past. The appropriate role of the state is to regulate, facilitate and create an enabling environment that fosters development and empowers citizens but does not stifle initiative or enterprise, leaving citizens room to manage and shape their own communities. The public purpose of the government, i.e. solving public problems, remains the same as before.

However, the government in the 21st century has to solve them in ways that does not create bureaucracy. The era of hierarchical government bureaucracy, the predominant organization model used for delivering public services and fulfil public policy goals is now slowly coming to an end. In a fast changing world, power is more dispersed, the boundaries more fluid, and populations more diverse and mobile – they defy simple, one-size-fits-all solutions. Governance is no longer top-down execution by government fiat.

The old style bureaucratic structures no longer fit the needs of the societies. Instead, the governments have to build networks of capacities in which the combined resources and expertise of many agencies – governmental and non-governmental – and individuals are brought together to address a particular public problem. Hierarchical governments are being replaced by interlinked webs or networks of agencies within the government and often linked beyond it to the civil society organizations and the market. The core responsibility of the government has shifted from managing people and programmes to coordinating resources for producing public value. In the new framework of Public Management, governments have been transformed from an operational agency to a regulatory and facilitating organization. The combined resources and expertise of the government, civil society and market are harnessed in co-producing the governance of the society.

In the new governance paradigm many of the activities of the government have either been out-sourced in recognition of the fact that the private sector and the not for profit sector has better capacity and greater comparative advantage in delivering those services. But governments have not become obsolete and nor can we can conceive of ordering our society without them. Even Adam Smith who had argued for leaving much of the governance of society to the invisible hands of the free market was constrained to acknowledge a limited but crucial role of government in justice, law and order, defence, property rights, justice, public works and the general well-being of citizens.

Even today the most ardent supporter of the free market agree that provisioning of public goods – education, health, product safety, worker’s safety, discriminatory hiring and pension funds, and pensions and laws protecting women and children – can only be done by the government. Our experience of the last century has also taught us that the government is essential as a countervailing authority to the market through antitrust and regulatory roles and the regulation of business in matters of environment. Above all, the government remains the guarantor of social justice and for the provision of social safety nets.

One of the most hopeful developments in this direction has been what has come to be known as ‘government innovations’. Government innovation has caught the imagination of the government and the citizens alike around the world, unlike earlier attempts like the structural adjustment reforms (SAR) with an emphasis on managerial solutions. These were viewed with suspicion since they were perceived as mechanisms to weaken the government and expand the power of the market. Unlike SAR, government innovations have several advantages. Innovations are not exported from ‘donor’ countries but rather are ‘home grown’ in response to local problems; they are ideologically unencumbered and not necessarily tied to market-based solutions without being hostile to the market; and because innovations address real problems facing citizens, their solution usually confers a perceptible and immediate relief to the citizens.

It is not surprising that government innovations are fast becoming a global movement. The acknowledgement that public problems may best be solved by combined societal effort has transformed our view of how society is governed, and helps open up new possibilities and opportunities. In the last two decades or so there have been numerous innovations in governance which have not only made governments more effective but also more citizen-centric.

Government innovations have had a transformative impact on the way in which governance is conducted and delivered today; and cumulatively these innovations have helped to usher in a paradigm shift and fundamentally altered the way in which we think of societal governance. Governance is, as noted earlier, no longer the top-down execution of the government fiat. It is both diffused and at the same time focused and integrated from the perspective of the citizens and service users; governance is produced collaboratively through a pooling of resources, personnel and capacities. The old style silo-like bureaucratic structures no longer fit the needs of societies, and need to be replaced by an interlinked web or network of agencies within the government, and often linked beyond it to the civil society organizations and the market.

The introduction of collaborative arrangements, as well as the adoption of certain market principles and practices in the conduct of government has been beneficial. These arrangements have introduced flexibility, cost consciousness, and responsiveness that was earlier singularly lacking in governments. In particular, the incorporation of the idea of competition in the delivery of government services and procurement policies has helped to reduce indifference and callousness that had typically characterized the behaviour of public servants because of the government’s monopoly on service delivery.

Another successful innovation has been the concept of citizens as customers. As tax payers, citizens pay the salaries of public servants. It is thus only proper that citizen satisfaction be the yardstick for judging government performance. Citizens have certain legitimate expectations of the standard and quality of services, and there is no reason why the government should not be able to deliver it. A number of governments have employed instruments like ‘citizens charters’ to set out in a transparent way the standards and types of services that are being offered to them and with a clear mechanism for redress if those commitments are not fulfilled. This is a major innovation that is now widely used.

Governments are also importing innovative concepts such as productivity, performance based budgeting, cost accounting and flexible budget accounts from the private sector allowing the agencies to roll-over and retain savings from one fiscal year to another, and generally encouraging and rewarding productivity. Like their counterparts in the private sector, the government managers have adopted the practice of setting goals and targets; the powers of the treasury and finance departments to micro-manage have been trimmed; the audit rules have been changed to allow shifting money between accounts and budget lines, so that departments can work more flexibly to achieve their departmental goals, and are not always constrained by rigid compliance requirements of the finance ministries. In Singapore, for instance, a department is allowed to borrow up to 10 per cent from its budget allocation of the following year in order to facilitate some restructuring which requires up-front costs.

Governance today is not the same that it was twenty years ago. The governance of the society is no longer the sole prerogative of the government – the public purposes are today advanced through the combined effort of all the three sectors in society. With the adoption of the market principle of competition, governments are now outsourcing many of their tasks to avail the comparative advantages of the other providers and market incentives are being used to advance public policy instead of setting up bureaucratic agencies to change public habits. Department and agencies have cut across their bureaucratic jurisdictions in order to provide seamless service to the citizens; they have become flexible and cost effective by introducing cost budgeting and emphasizing outcomes and not merely outputs. They are delivering quality services through the introduction of the International Standards Organization (ISO) benchmarks and have unleashed a plethora of innovations like the citizens charter, public sector report cards and participatory budgeting. The governments are vigorously delegating, devolving, decentralizing and de-concentrating their power and control of the purse in recognition of the principle that problems are best solved by those who deal with it. And through the extensive application of information technology not only has the cost of transaction been cut but also the government is being delivered at the door steps of the citizens.

Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the Ash Institute can modestly claim to have been at the cutting edge of bringing the concept of ‘innovations’ into the government. It needs to be stressed that ‘government innovations’ is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The end is and must be the object of innovations: to enhance the quality of life, be citizen centric and serve the citizens. The larger well-being of the citizens and an orderly and socially just society must be the ultimate goal of innovations. All innovations have to be viewed through the dual prism of public service: service to the citizens and a socially just society. If they fail this acid test, their value is greatly diminished.

The framework of New Public Management and ‘government innovations’ constitutes a radical departure from the way in which societal governance has usually been delivered even though, as was pointed out earlier, the purpose of the government remains the same. Together they have helped to make governments efficient, transparent and cost effective. But in the ultimate analysis, their success will be judged to the extent they have advanced the well-being of the citizens. Government is the guarantor of social justice. It is this role that gives government its distinctive character and the authority to use coercion legally or tax its citizens. The NPM may have made governance cost effective and efficient but there is evidence to suggest it may have equally contributed to emaciating the government, especially its institutional and organizational capabilities. In not giving enough attention to strengthening democratic institutions and processes, it takes for granted the existence of the rule of law and worse, neglects its responsibilities as the guarantor of social justice.

The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed the largest economic expansion in the history of the world. But the benefits of that affluence have not percolated down to the bottom half of the population; and the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening every year for the last quarter of a century. In absolute numbers there are more people living in poverty today than a hundred years ago. It is not surprising that many people, especially the poor, are losing faith in their governments. The challenge for the ‘New Public Management’ and ‘Government Innovations’ in the 21st century is to find imaginative, creative and effective ways to combine effectiveness with equity. Only then will government innovations be worthy of their name.

Gowher Rizvi

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