Politics of administrative reform and reorganization in Bangladesh

Abstract

The present military government in Bangladesh has implemented a number of major administrative reform and reorganization measures. The government claims that effectuation of such measures has led to the decentralization of power and authority to the grass‐root level ensuring increasing popular participation in administration; the achievement of cost‐effectiveness by reducing the number of ministries, divisions and personnel from the public pay roll and by quickening of the pace of decision‐making due to elimination of redundant bureaucratic layers. But the implementation, in reality, has contributed among other things to the legitimization and strengthening of the military government, and a weakening of the democratically organized political opposition. It also enables generalist civil servants to preserve, and to some extent strengthen, their position within the civil service system.

A Framework for Results Based Management to The Public Sector in Egypt:Challenges and Opportunities

“…The reforms have unfortunately faltered in Egypt for lack of appreciation and support by the civil servants who are responsible for implementing reforms. Most bureaucrats' organizational culture resort to a protectionist attitude toward the insertion of RBM; whereby, they always consider the reform attempts as downgrading their present status, position, and power and create resistance to distract reform activities (Khan 1991;Sarker 2004;World Bank 1996). The tendency of most civil servants to preserve the status quo, and, if possible, extend their zone of influence within the public service system, is very much evident in Egypt.…”

“…In Egypt, few political governments tried to reform the public administration in order to establish the principles and elements of NPM. The reasons include: a lack of knowledge about NPM and RBM methodologies, the mentality of lengthening the power, the lack of commitment and the fact that political leadership has never been cordial in their attempt to revamp the running system and ensure the outcomes, efficiency, performance and accountability in the public administration (Khan, 1998). …”

How Does Social Capital Enhancing Institutional Design Foster Political Decentralization? - A Comparative Study between Bangladesh and West Bengal

“…(1) bureaucratic 'empire building' through creation of unnecessary posts in UPZ; 2 over their officers (Khan 1987;Haque and Rahman 2003).…”

“…For Bangladesh, as the paper shows in previous chapter, academic literatures mostly links the failure in decentralization to "colonial hangover" or "dominating tendency" of the bureaucratic organization. (Khan 1987;Haque and Rahman 2003). What this pool of literatures misses is widespread politicization in bureaucracy in post-independent Bangladesh, and capacity of politicization to distort bureaucracy as change-agent and instead to force it to collaborate narrow national elite.…”

Paradoxes of Decentralization in Bangladesh

“…The next phase in the process concerns the fate of the CARR recommendations. The major recommendations included (a) a directly elected chief executive (chairman) and a representative parishad (council) at each successive sub-national and local level, i.e., Zila (district), upazila (sub-district) and union; (b) popularly elected chairmen as chief co-ordinators at all levels, who were to be provided with adequate staff support; (c) elected councils at each level with full functional control over officials working at that level; (d) adequate devolution of administrative, financial and judicial powers at the rifa and upazila levels; (e) the elimination of division and sub-division as tiers of field administration; ( f ) elected chairmen of lower councils to be ex-officio members of the councils immediately above; and (g) development of the infrastructure at the upazila level (Khan, 1987a).…”