Discusses reforms under Conservative administrations of Margaret Thatcher and John Major and Labour administration of Tony Blair, arguing that it has been primarily concerned with management rather than quality of advice which civil servants give to ministers; Great Britain.
Since the late 1980s, many African countries have been reforming their civil services as a part of the process of state redesign. Unfortunately, these reforms have not been very successful because of faulty diagnosis and prognosis. They have failed to tackle the major problems confronting African civil services.
These include serious human resource management issues of leadership, merit pay and related governance reforms, the appropriate strategy for
mobilising resources for civil service reform (CSR) and for implementing
such reforms. These issues must be adequately addressed before African
countries can make significant progress in CSR and in development.
Using existing documentation and some original survey and interviewing work, this paper explores the recent reforms in British central government. It attempts to measure them against the analytical perspective of NPM and the postbureau cratic reform paradigm and to discover how the impact of these reforms has transformed the accountability of public servants as a result of changes already imposed and those signalled by recent official documentation.