Reforming the public sector: how to achieve better transparency, service, and leadership.

Dutil, Patrice A.

Reforming the Public Sector: How to Achieve Better Transparency, Service, and Leadership

Edited by GIOVANNI TRIA and GIOVANNI VALOTTI. Washington and Rome: The Brookings Institution and the Scuola superiore della pubblica amministrazione (SSPA), 2012. Pp. 311, index.

A few years ago, the Brookings Institution and the Italian Scuola superiore della pubblica amministrazione partnered to publish works in public administration. This is the third volume of their series. The first two books, both published in 2011, focused on Italy and the European Union. This book examines a broader scope of public administration issues and, as the subtitle indicates, the editors boldly promise to provide advice on how to resolve them. To this end, the editors have brought together fourteen articles, half of which are written by Italian authors (many of whom are listed as either research assistants or not described at all in the list of contributors) on mostly Italian topics. The other seven articles are mostly literature reviews by an international cast, some of whom are well known to the Anglo-American audience: Michael Barzelay, Geert Bouckaert, Christopher Pollitt, James Perry and Montgomery van Wart, to name a few. The editors themselves contribute an introduction. Giovanni Tria, President of the Italian School of Public Administration at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and Giovanni Valotti, then Dean of the Bocconi Undergraduate School and a professor of public management at Bocconi University, argue that the challenges of public administration in Europe --limited resources, poor accountability, decreased efficiencies and low levels of motivation--must be addressed by public sector managers.

These are fine ambitions, and the contributors follow a logical route to finding answers in sections that examine transparency, leadership, public sector motivation, public sector performance and efforts of reform, respectively. As in all collections, there are strong pieces and weaker ones but this book disappoints at every turn. Few chapters are noteworthy and none offers the realistic "how to" advice promised in the title.

The first section focuses on transparency and gives a clue to the structure of the book. Irvine Lapsley of the Edinburgh School of Business contributes a short chapter summarizing the thinking on the "audit society" and offers nothing original. It is followed by a chapter, written by Maria Cucciniello, Greta Nasi and Raffaella Saporito, that presents a model to assess transparency and applies it to twenty-one municipal governments in Italy. Their results are inconclusive, showing that some jurisdictions provide more detail on their websites than others. These two chapters are frustrating in their avoidance of the elephant in the room: The 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International ranked Italy 72nd among 176 countries, just ahead of Liberia and just behind South Africa. (Canada's ranking has slipped on this scale, now in 9th position). Italy has serious problems of corruption, both in its political class and its bureaucracy. Regrettably, the authors of this chapter do not recognize the size of the challenges that beset public administration in that country. Measuring words on websites is simply not getting to the problem of opacity in public administration and the corruption that it can foment. As a "how to," this effort simply fails. Neglecting these realities in my opinion impairs the research effort.

Corruption and weak rule of law thwart prosperity. Indeed, a strong case can be made that Italy is probably one of the worst governed entities in Western Europe, despite being the third largest economy in the Eurozone. There is no doubt that the blame for such a mediocre performance can be spread widely, but it has to reach the bureaucracy. In June 2011, the International Monetary Fund confirmed that, compared to its European neighbours, Italy suffered from excessive regulation. In the Index of Economic Freedom for 2011, the country ranked only 87th in the world, in particular due to its high rate of corruption and excessive state interventionism. A telling indicator of administrative incompetence is the size of the underground economy, which is conservatively estimated at 15 per cent of the GDP. Italy's debt (about $2.6 trillion) is larger today than the entire economies of Ireland, Portugal and Greece combined. The Italian economy has been stalled for over a decade and its GDP is still 5 per cent below its 2007 pre-crisis level.

Can the public sector help? The second section of the book examines public service motivation. Two chapters are useful in discussing the state of the literature on this topic, followed by a comparative piece on how European public servants measure up. The problem with all of the chapters, however, is that they seem to include all publicly appointed workers--teachers, doctors, police and ministry employees. They conclude that a key motivator to working in the public sector is ... to help the public. This is hardly a compelling conclusion, and better studies have shown that workers in both the NGO and private sectors hold similar views. The work of Canadian governments and scholars in understanding the drivers of employee engagement (arguably more important than motivation, which cannot be effectively measured) is far ahead of these studies, but has not been examined. Tellingly, but without explanation, Italian public sector employees in this study rank low in comparison to their neighbours.

The work presented on leadership is hardly more convincing. Montgomery van Wart provides a review of Bernard Bass's latest iteration on "transformative leadership" but the chapters examining "how" governments can improve the performance of their public sector captains say nothing new. A chapter comparing political and administrative roles concludes that politicians enjoy practicing politics and policy making and that public servants are not involved in politics. I doubt this will surprise many readers.

The section on measuring government performance is perhaps a bit stronger. Geert Bouckaert's short piece makes the case that governments are focused on measuring by numbers, but does not explore which numbers actually make a difference. The more interesting chapter on strategic management over three years by Denita Cepiku and her team comes to the conclusion that "the reform process regarding strategic management in the Italian central government [has] been unsatisfactory so far" (p. 211) Giovanni Valotti, one of the editors, contributes a final chapter entitled, "Public Sector Reforms: State of the Art and Future Challenges," cataloguing the usual paths that have been taken to achieve change which, as he writes, "could go on forever" (p. 291), because generalities usually do.

In sum, this book is of limited use. Regrettably, while some chapters are strong on theory, offer some interesting literature reviews and sometimes display impressive statistical techniques, they are very weak on evidence. The descriptions required to elucidate concepts and to justify approaches are altogether missing, and the analyses yield little to challenge convention. In all cases, Canadian scholars and government studies have moved far beyond what is contained in this book, yet this country's contribution is entirely ignored. This is not unusual in the international literature, of course, but it does not have to be accepted either.

Patrice A. Dutil is Professor and Interim Chair, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario.