BACK in my civil service days, one comment by a senior stuck in my head for years. In a moment of candid frustration, the senior civil servant confessed that he and his colleagues were busy throughout their workday. Yet, if you were to take a step back and look at the big picture of the state of governance in Pakistan, nothing was really changing. This senior civil servant was obviously quite invested in Pakistan’s institutional development but was often frustrated by these ‘contradictory’ half-truths. The reason why I say half-truths is that not all civil servants are as overworked or invested in institutional development. Nor has the civil service not evolved in Pakistan over time, although this change has certainly been at a slow pace.

So, what is really happening behind these ‘contradictory’ half-truths? It was several years after his remarks, that I found a conceptual language to express this apparent disconnect.

From a macro perspective, the first half-truth is of central importance. The civil service indeed has pockets of excellence with highly qualified individuals motivated for public service. At the same time, there is a large part of the civil service with the exact opposite. Combine this with a system where there are few disincentives for low performance (eg it is hard to fire a civil servant from a job), and you have a system where the highly qualified category is given most of the work, while the low-performing category gets to slack off.

What is happening behind the contradictory half-truths?

The result? A system that relies on a small number of individuals for performance and consequently at an aggregate level does not move much. To the distant observer, the bureaucracy would seem like a stationary object representing the status quo. To the keen observer, there are interesting heterogeneities at play with some civil servants overworked and others slacking off.

Zooming into the micro perspective, the nature of work being assigned to civil servants determines the functional performance of the bureaucracy. A common theme that you might hear from civil servants is that they are quite busy with tasks throughout their workday, but these tasks are not necessarily related to their core functions.

Here, the concept of ‘isomorphic mimicry’ introduced by Lant Pritchett, Matt Andrews and Michael Woolcock is relevant. Pritchett and coauthors use the analogy of two snakes to explain the concept, which goes as follows. The eastern coral snake and the scarlet king snake both have red, yellow and black stripes and consequently look similar. However, the former is venomous, and the latter is not. As a result, the non-venomous scarlet king snake can enjoy all the survival benefits of being venomous just because it looks like or ‘isomorphically mimics’ the venomous eastern coral snake.

Applying this analogy to the context of the civil service, you can have the public-sector organisation prioritising form over function just to look like a successful public-sector organisation. Imagine a public-sector organisation implementing a few ‘international best practices’ that do not necessarily work in the Pakistani context to look like a highly functional public-sector organisation in another country just to keep donors, politicians and voters happy in the short run. The result? A public sector where functional improvement takes a back seat in the long run.

At an even more granular level, the day-to-day activities of civil servants also offer interesting clues. ‘Firefighting’ is a word that often instantly resonates with overworked civil servants in Pakistan, which represents both an assignment of too many tasks and an inability to focus on the core tasks of the job. Recent work by Aditya Dasgupta and Devesh Kapur documents this phenomenon of ‘bureaucratic overload’ in India where civil servants are not able to allocate enough time to managerial tasks, which in turn risks the functional performance of the organisation. In the Pakistani context, similar ‘firefighting’ puts functional performance on the back burner.

There are thousands of well-meaning and hardworking civil servants in Pakistan who share the same frustration that the senior civil servant felt at work. The unfortunate part is that broader structural challenges of the civil service blunt the effort of these civil servants leading to the governance outcomes that we observe today. There is no silver bullet to solve the broader structural issues of the civil service since the problem is multifaceted and complex as discussed above. However, finding the right conceptual framing to define these complex problems is itself a gateway to potential solutions. After all, a problem well defined is already half-solved.

The writer has a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Twitter: @KhudadadChattha

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2021