Proposals to improve the functioning and organisation of the public administration are always welcome. However, those who announce them and commit to implementing them should have at least a basic knowledge of our administrative history in order to help them avoid mistakes and make the most of missed opportunities.
These were my thoughts when I heard the Minister of Interior announce a programme to evaluate the services provided by the public sector. According to his announcements, citizens will be able to express their satisfaction or displeasure, anger or joy at the service they receive through a platform that will be opened, on purpose, twice a year. No further details were given and the confusion between the internal (civil servant) evaluation of civil servants, which aims to develop and promote them, is completely confused with another evaluation, external, which focuses on the services provided and not on the persons.
The description, of course, of the architecture of the system announced is not related to the Evaluation but is more akin to an opinion survey in which participants externalise their reactions of the moment. This process is not sufficient to improve public organisations, nor does it make the citizen an evaluator.
From the thymic to the logical articulation of actions and results, there is a continent that has been covered, in the last century, by Administrative Science (a cognitive and empirical field largely unknown in our country, not only to ministers).
In any case, we know from the more than twenty years of experience in the management of Community programmes in our country that the evaluation of an action or a programme can only be carried out in relation to the objectives of the service/structure being evaluated. In other words, as a citizen, I must know what the particular public service I am evaluating can offer. I cannot ask everyone for everything or everything I think or would like to be offered. The disclosure/publication of what each particular service offers must be accompanied - as a matter of obligation - by a commitment as to what will happen if it does not comply with what it has committed itself to. All these commitments must be included in a ‘Charter of Commitments’ to citizens. This reform, known worldwide as the ‘Citizens Charter’, is already more than 35 years old since its first implementation in the United Kingdom and is one of the most popular administrative reforms.
The same has happened in our country! As unlikely as it may seem, projects for the creation of “Charters of Commitment” were planned and implemented as stand-alone projects of a solid reform programme, with a slight time lag compared to the first ones in the UK, almost 30 years ago. Who remembers the distant 1998 when the Quality for Citizens programme was launched? This included a series of public administration reform projects and actions and its preparation had taken two (2) years!
The central idea of the project was to assess with quality indicators all parts of the administrative system, i.e., its functions (i.e., the rules and procedures under which public services act/decide), the structures and infrastructures that serve as fixed points for the planning, implementation and evaluation of each service, the staff and financial resources without which the implementation of any programme or project is impossible and, ultimately, the services provided. For each of the parts of the administrative system we would not confine ourselves to describing the current situation but would make proposals for their optimal functioning.
More importantly, however, we were looking for the common meaning that underlies all parts of the administrative system. Only with such a macroscopic view of the administration can one understand why many of the individual reforms, while well designed and there is political will to implement them, fail.
What we learned from Quality for Citizens was that the strategic targeting of reform is crucial to the success/failure of any reform programme. And we gained this knowledge through our defeat by the forces of clientelism. Its roots and networks nullified the reform momentum of the program's proponents. The same was repeated in subsequent programmes such as the ‘re-foundation of the state’.
Of all the actions of the programme, only some managed to survive and, after many years, those reforms were implemented to a certain extent (e.g. of all the actions of “Quality for Citizens”, only one-stop services - the CCP - were implemented, while the proposals for Good Regulation took almost 15 years to be reflected in the first law, 4048/12).
However, the ten-year period of guardianship put the brakes on any reform momentum. The post-memorandum government of the New Democracy, despite having much more means and resources for administrative reform than in the past, did not seem to have either the strategic focus against clientelism or a solid systemic plan.
The gradual slow implementation and the salami-slicing of reforms, combined with rapid technological and geopolitical upheavals, are leading the Greek public administration to weakening and decline.
It is the duty of the reformers to strive not only to speed up but also to make the reforms more effective. Otherwise, the announced reforms will be more of a deja vu than a step forward and evolution of our public administration.