Politics of Public Sector Performance: Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries

In: Routledge research in comparative politics

Abstract

"It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak, and the public sector especially is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical phenomenon: effective public organizations in the midst of failure. While most literature is written from a focuses predominantly on state failure, corruption and other elements of bad governance, this book instead studies the phenomenon of Pockets of Effectiveness. In developing regions of the world there are public organisations and state-owned enterprises which provide public goods and services relatively effectively in a hostile environment dominated by bad governance. The authors provide the first systematic and comparative study of these exceptional organisations in five developing regions: Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East and the Caribbean and offer a political economy model for why and how Pockets of Effectiveness emerge, how they manage to persist and what their reform potential is. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, sociology, development, public administration and management."