Administrative Reforms and Policy Capacity in Asia : An Analysis of ADB's Public Sector Management Projects

The past 30 years witnessed massive shifts in administrative systems all over the world but there is little consensus in literature on how to successfully carry out reforms. In Asia, the diversity of economic advancement and varying roles of the bureaucracy in society offer a unique opportunity to examine different approaches to administrative reforms. Based on this diverse experience, capacity emerged as a universal area of concern in administrative reforms particularly for developing Asia. As Farazmand (2002) noted, reforms in developing countries “may involve a number of structural and process changes and improvements…by building the technical, professional, and administrative management capacity”. What these capacities are remain poorly studied and little research has been done to guide policy makers on how to go about administrative reform. This study seeks to fill this gap by conducting a qualitative analysis of 20 Project Validation Reports (PVRs) of projects tagged under a Public Sector Management. PVRs are independently verified versions of a project's achievements of outputs/outcomes by operations staff. These were coded and analysed to explore the nature of how capacity is embedded into the discourse of administrative reforms in development projects financed by international financing institutions (IFIs) like the Asian Development Bank. It does this by answering the following specific research questions: How is the concept of capacity important in administrative reforms? What are the critical capacities typically identified as contributory to the failure or success of administrative reforms? By refracting ADB's experiences in managing such projects through the lens of capacity, a set of skills and resources critical for administrative reforms was derived, categorized as either analytical capacity, operational capacity or political capacity. Using cluster analysis, five clusters were identified to represent the interrelationships between the capacities. The study contributes to the literature on evaluation of development aid specifically for administrative reforms. It also hopes to provide implications for how development projects meant to improve administrative systems should be carried out by IFIs and governments