I started working as a technical adviser in the Home Office (Ministère de l’Administra-tion Territoriale et de la Décentralisal’Administra-tion) in March 2004. The post was financed by Danish official aid, which had supported the decentralisation process since 1993.
Deploying an advisor was, however, a new initiative, probably reflecting a certain impatience with the process in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as an inability to understand what was going on. From the Burkinabè point of view, I was accepted in order to accommodate the wishes of a donor and then placed next to the French adviser who, however, differed from me on three points: he represented the former colonial power, he managed economic resources, and he mastered French eloquently. As such, I constituted less of a threat and was probably viewed as a curiosity who had to be entertained for reasons of politeness. I, on the other hand, had the ambition to engage in the work of the ministry, supporting the decen-tralisation process as best I could and trying to view the cooperation with donors from the Burkinabè side. This significant mismatch of expectations took its time to become reasonably straightened out, and yet, even when I left the ministry in May 2006, the different expectations had not managed to result in a fruitful symbiosis.
The Home Office is a peculiar ministry in that the administrative leaders of regions, provinces and departments refer to it. These civil servants constitute the backbone of public administration and state power in Burkina Faso, playing a significant role in maintaining law and order, solving social disputes, overseeing development activ-ities and coordinating public management within their geographical jurisdictions.
As they are appointed at cabinet meetings presided over by the president, they are also the representatives and main actors of the president locally. They are decisive pieces in what I have described as the social fabric of rulers and ruled in rural Burki-na Faso (Engberg-Pedersen 2003: 15ff). Delegating the implementation of decen-tralisation to this ministry reflects the ambiguous approach to the subject in the early 2000s. Historically, the Home Office has been preoccupied with security and with controlling the national territory. Thus, putting the ministry in charge of a re-form that was likely to undermine its power amounted to letting the fox guard the henhouse. On the other hand, without having this ministry on board, the process of
decentralisation was hardly going to succeed. Still, it is difficult to view the decision as anything but a strong political signal that the creation of local government bodies should proceed with caution.
However, the Permanent Secretary (PS) was an enthusiastic man who clearly want-ed to take decentralisation forward. Possibly because he had participatwant-ed in my appointment, I had fairly easy access to him, but he did not have any clear idea about what he wanted from me. My job description did little to identify the work I was to do, and subsequently I began to supply the PS with notes on different as-pects of the decentralisation process. I also started cultivating a close relationship with the planning and study department in the ministry, assuming that it had a cen-tral role to play in concretising the decencen-tralisation policy.
Institutionally, the implementation of the decentralisation process was not organ-ised in any simple manner. The National Commission on Decentralisation, which had been relatively well funded by donors in the 1990s – funding that had dried up – was still in existence and was expected to play an active part in shaping decentral-isation. The Commission was first attached to the Prime Minister’s Office, but it was later transferred to the Home Office. Within the Commission, two departments were responsible for local government investments and capacity development respec-tively, and they had been the primary implementing units in establishing the urban municipalities in the 1990s. Thus, practical experience with decentralisation was located in a weakened institution, while formal responsibility was assigned to an institution with an ambiguous relationship to the process.
One reason why the Commission was not abolished entirely was undoubtedly its support among donors, who were suspicious of how the Home Office might take charge of decentralisation. Although the donors themselves had argued for a more institutionally integrated management of the implementation process – given that the Commission had finalised its primary task of reflecting upon and conceiving Burkinabè decentralisation – the mid-1990s dynamism of the Commission saved it from closure. An indication that the Commission was not being kept alive to pre-serve jobs for neopatrimonial reasons is the fact that all its leading members left it when its significance started to decline. In view of its history and institutional posi-tion, however, the Commission was superior to the planning and study department in the Home Office, and this weakened the administration’s ability to take charge of the process. The combined effects of Burkinabè politics, including a challenged president, and donor pressure had produced a situation of institutional confusion which contributed to the slow implementation process.
Above I have talked about departments, as this term appears to be the most correct one, given the organisational chart of the ministry. However, the planning and study department consisted of a newly arrived director, a secretary and later a graduate from the university. They were squeezed into two offices measuring 15 m2 each, in-cluding archives, and their ability to print depended on donor funding. Like quite a number of Burkinabè intellectuals, the director was eager to change his country and wanted to contribute to implementing the decentralisation process. However, to his annoyance his office was often occupied by visitors trying to promote this or that cause. Likewise, the two implementing departments of the Commission were no longer staffed by more than a few individuals. A Canadian adviser was still attached to one of them, but he seemed to have been forgotten, as he did not do much work any longer. The working hours of the directors and the capable staff in the Home Office always included Saturdays and often evenings. This had become such an ingrained practice that I was once asked what I did on Saturdays, as I was not in the office.
Partly due to capacity constraints and the institutionally confused organisation of the implementation, managing the process was concentrated in the PS’s office and was completely dependent on his initiatives. He had gathered a small team of young people together to write a draft bill to get the rural areas included in the decentrali-sation. However, everything had to go through him, and he was extremely bogged down with work. The queue of visitors, including donor missions, practically never disappeared. Although my office was located just across the corridor from his, it could take days to find a calm moment when I could get to talk to him. A number of these visitors undoubtedly came to promote private interests, and some may have succeeded, but the primary interests of the PS and the Director of Planning were closely associated with furthering the process of decentralisation. Despite the diffi-cult conditions, by the end of 2004 the ministry managed to draft a new bill to re-place the one from 1998 which had stopped short of extending the decentralisation to the rural areas. The bill was adopted by the cabinet and the parliament, allowing for rural municipalities alongside the urban ones and creating local governments at the regional level as well. It also specified the responsibilities that were to be trans-ferred to the various local governments. The bill was a major step forward, though it did not stipulate the resources with which local governments should carry out their tasks. One and a half years later, in May 2006, a second bill determined this issue.
A major challenge was to get the different line ministries, notably the ministries of health and education, to accept that local governments should have authority in their fields. The line ministries were worried that ignorant and illiterate peasants should influence the services they provide, and they saw the decentralisation pro-cess as a loss of control. However, both for obvious democratic reasons and to put
some content into the new local governments in the context of the extreme scarcity of economic resources, transferring existing activities from the state to the munici-palities and the regional governments was inevitable. The PS adopted a strategy of facilitation to get the line ministries on board. He managed to get all the Permanent Secretaries of these ministries, including the one in the Ministry of Finance, into the same room outside the capital, and then he virtually disappeared, leaving it to the others to come up with a result in the seminar. The PS of the Ministry of Finance took control, and the strategy succeeded in the sense that the line ministries agreed to establish a division of labour with the local governments. My PS later informed me that, had it not been for the relatively flexible Danish support, there would have been no funds for organising the seminar, which he believed to be a turning point in the implementation of the new law. Undoubtedly, per diems were paid to all the ticipants, but the budget of the meeting would hardly have financed one single par-ticipant for a two-day course by the Danish union for lawyers and economists.
The scarcity of financial resources available for implementing the decentralisation process came out clearly when the Home Office organised an information cam-paign ahead of the local elections in 2006. Given the high level of illiteracy in the countryside and the novelty of decentralised policy-making, there was an obvious need to inform rural dwellers about the responsibilities and functioning of local gov-ernment bodies. One would think that a meeting in many, if not most, of the 7-8000 villages in the country would be necessary to reach most voters. However, funds did not permit more than a two-day meeting in each of the three hundred departments, which have on average between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants each. At these meetings, a maximum of a couple of hundred notables and community leaders took part and were then expected to disseminate the information in the villages outside the departmental capital – an expectation which, to put it mildly, was rather optimis-tic. Community-based organisations and other associations also participated in the campaign, but they did so unevenly across the country, meaning that some depart-ments were left with just one official meeting.
The dialogue with the group of donors that were interested in decentralisation con-stituted another challenge. One problem was that the donors could not agree on much, and each ran their own programmes. Even sharing information about their respective activities was difficult. Some supported specific regions, others had no faith in the Home Office and wanted to go through the National Association of Local Government, and yet others tried to support the national implementation process as the Burkinabè government had organised it. In the last group there were also diverse views, for instance, on how to organise financial support for the investments by lo-cal government bodies. However, these donors agreed that they wanted an
imple-mentation plan before they would commit themselves to anything, and since this plan kept waiting to materialise, many of them expressed deep frustration with the Home Office. Interestingly, the donors seemed to have had no understanding of the difficulties and the step-by-step nature of the process. Their frustration reflected a view of decentralisation as a technical exercise, not a political one fraught with dif-ferent interests and power struggles, nor did they realise the capacity constraints that were hampering the process. Expecting one document with detailed descrip-tions of financeable activities implementing all aspects of decentralisation did not match the reality in which different actors had to be persuaded, marginalised, reas-sured, capacitated etc. before the next step in the process could be outlined. Due to the extreme shortage of financial resources in the Home Office, flexible donor fund-ing enablfund-ing it to act was highly appreciated by the PS. Few donors realised this.
Instead, they sat on their hands waiting for a grand master-plan to be produced.
Unfortunately this incompatibility between donor expectations and political realities often characterises large civil-service reforms in poor countries.
Given the institutional confusion, the capacity constraints and the political nature of the decentralisation process, it was no wonder that the PS centralised management of the planning and implementation process in his office. This was, however, a con-straining factor in itself. Capable persons outside his office were not used optimally, despite their own strong wish to participate in the work, and it was very difficult to obtain information about decisions and next steps in the process. When confronted with the lack of information dissemination and delegation as a major weakness of the organisational practices of the ministry, the PS told me that there were persons in the ministry whom he could not criticise due to their political connections. This supports the neopatrimonial view that merits and administrative hierarchies are less important than nepotism and socio-political relations in determining how pub-lic administration in African countries works. Although the PS undoubtedly felt this to be a problem, it is only part of the explanation. Highly significant too was the historical practice of Burkinabè leaders in centralizing decision-making. The PS made no attempt to use capable members of staff without political connections, and the lack of dissemination of information was closely linked with the use of lence as a means to manage difficult processes. President Compaoré was also si-lent at a number of key moments in the prolonged social crisis after Zongo’s killing (Hagberg 2002). Though sharing information is a way of exercising power, and be-ing silent a way of limitbe-ing the potential actions of one’s opponents, the limited dis-semination of information by the PS appeared to be more an organisational practice than a deliberate attempt to inhibit opponents. Despite being annoyed at being kept in ignorance, most staff appeared to be used to the lack of information and delega-tion, and they did not raise it as an issue.
Conclusion
Neopatrimonialism argues that African public administration primarily serves pri-vate interests. Accordingly, a civil-service reform like the decentralisation process in Burkina Faso should be in line with the private interests of key actors. The slow im-plementation of the reform in the early 2000s could be said to have served Presi-dent Compaoré and his interest in staying in power by avoiding unpredictable change in Burkinabè politics. This interest was private and in opposition to the pub-lic good of increasing local democratisation in the country. Yet, from 2004 to 2006 substantial results were achieved, including the creation of a legal framework for setting up municipalities in the countryside, transferring functions and authority to local governments and providing them with (albeit limited) resources; an agreement with line ministries about the division of labour with local government bodies; a document detailing the implementation of the legal framework; and the first nation-wide local elections. It is difficult to see these results as serving the private interests of anyone, including the president. Many things can be criticised (the distinction between urban and rural municipalities, the inadequate human and financial re-sources made available to local governments, the retention of the state representa-tive in the territory of the local governments, etc.), but the results must also be ac-knowledged to have been impressive, given the political and capacity constraints under which they were produced.
My experience of working in the Burkinabè public administration is that it is affected by a wide range of issues. Most obvious are the scarce financial and human re-sources, national politics and the institutional set-up of the administration. However, certain ingrained practices, notably the centralisation of information and deci-sion-making regarding issues of both major and minor importance, have a signifi-cant bearing on the effectiveness of public management, and these practices can be traced to the pre-colonial practices of leaders in this Mossi-dominated country (Engberg-Pedersen 2003: 15-34). In trying to understand public administration in African counties, it appears to be as important to uncover such norms and practices as individuals’ neopatrimonial or rational-legal motivations. Or, in Ole Therkildsen’s words (2014: 139): ‘To claim that African states are neopatrimonial, as many ana-lysts do, may often tell us little about how politics and administration actually work there.’
Note
1 ‘Public management’ and ‘public administration’ are used interchangeably in this article.
References
Bratton, M. and Walle, N.v.d. (1994). Neopatrimonial regimes and political transitions in Africa. World Politics, 46, pp. 453-489.
Chabal, P. and Daloz, J.-P. (1999). Africa works. Disorder as political instrument. Oxford/
Bloomington & Indianapolis: James Currey/Indiana University Press.
Clapham, C. (1985). Third World politics – an introduction. London: Croom Helm.
Engberg-Pedersen, L. (2003). Endangering development: Politics, projects, and environment in Burkina Faso. Westport: Praeger Publishers.
Friedland, R. and Alford, R.R. (1991). Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices, and institutional contradictions. In Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (eds.), The new institutional-ism in organizational analysis. Chicago & London: The Chicago University Press.
Hagberg, S. (2002). ‘Enough is enough’: An ethnography of the struggle against impunity in Burkina Faso. Journal of Modern African Studies, 40, pp. 217-246.
Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons? Public Administration, 69, pp. 3-19.
Leonard, D.K. (2008). Where are ‘pockets’ of effective agencies likely in weak governance states and why? A propositional inventory. Working Paper 306. Brighton: Centre for the Future State, Institute of Development Studies.
Loada, A. (2010). Contrôler l’opposition dans un régime semi-autoritaire: Le cas du Burkina Faso de Blaise Compaoré. In Hilgers, M. and Mazzocchetti, J. (eds.), Révoltes et oppositions dans un régime semi-autoritaire: Le cas du Burkina Faso. Paris: Karthala, pp. 269-294.
Loada, A. and Otayek, R. (1995). Les élections municipales du 12 février 1995 au Burkina Faso. Politique Africaine, 58, pp. 135-142.
Mkandawire, T. (2001). Thinking about developmental states in Africa. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 25, pp. 289-313.
Mkandawire, T. (2013). Neopatrimonialism and the political economy of economic perfor-mance in Africa: Critical reflections. Working Paper, 2013:1. Stockholm: Institute for Future Studies.
Therkildsen, O. (2000). Public sector reform in a poor, aid-dependent country, Tanzania.
Public Administration and Development, 20, pp. 61-71.
Therkildsen, O. (2005). Understanding public management through neopatrimonialism: a paradigm for African seasons? In Engel, U. and Olsen, G.R. (eds.), The African exception.
Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 35-51.
Therkildsen, O. (2014). Working in neopatrimonial settings: Public sector staff perceptions in Tanzania and Uganda. In Bierschenk, T. and Oliver de Sardan, J.-P. (eds.), States at work:
Dynamics of African bureaucracies. Leiden: Brill, pp. 113-144.
Thornton, P.H., Ocasio, W. and Lounsbury, M. (2012). The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure, and process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.