Public sector reform: learning from South-South exchange

Public sector reform is regarded as a crucial step in enhancing development and growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Reform programming is typically designed around the experiences of high-income countries. These experiences inform the recommendations of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, and international development stakeholders, such as the EU, FCDO, and the now defunct USAID. However, reform programming rooted in these knowledge frameworks has produced, at best, mixed results with LMICs lagging behind high-income countries on measures of state capacity — such as tax revenues, and the quality of public goods and services. In this context, we argue that there is great potential for LMICs to learn from South-to-South exchange — such as exchanges of resources, technology, information, etc. — on reform experiences. This blog piece presents insights from our engagement on public sector reform across two very different contexts — Pakistan and Montenegro. Despite significant differences between the two countries, from the size of the two states to their political histories, we found several commonalities in reform experiences that offer opportunities for South-South learning and exchange.

The 1997 World Development Report positioned the state as being at the heart of development — or lack thereof. The report and ensuing discussion helped foster a renewed interest in the state, leading to a focus on ‘good governance’ as foundational to development with billions of dollars loaned to LMICs for public sector governance programmes with a checklist of institutional design features to emulate for growth. However, an Independent Evaluation Group report in 2008 assessing World Bank support for public sector reform noted that while sectors such as taxation, public financial management, and transparency initiatives saw results, the civil service remained an area where reform produced little improvement. This assessment is in line with Merilee Grindle’s (2010) criticism that the use of the term ‘governance’ emphasised technical solutions that enabled certain sectors to improve, but served as ‘a hygienic way of dealing with political institutions and interactions’ that were far more entrenched and difficult to shift. This is reflected in the reality that reform is easier to define than it is to implement (Blum, Manning, and Srivastava 2012). Countries adopting World Bank and IMF proposals fell prey to ‘isomorphic mimicry’ — attempting to mimic and reproduce institutions — or rules of the game as they existed in Western countries which had very different political systems and institutions (Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock 2017). Lack of consultation with local stakeholders and insufficient time to test and embed reforms (Andrews 2013) meant that those directly engaging with reform implementation found the proposed changes to be an imposition by donor agencies and political and bureaucratic elites (Ali 2020).

Organisations working in this space have responded to these criticisms with increasingly fine-grained, diagnostic and problem-solving approaches, addressing the evidence gap in ‘what works’ by enhancing data collection and testing out specific interventions, nudges, and designs — e.g., on public sector absenteeism in Pakistan (Callen et al. 2020) — and improving bureaucratic job satisfaction (Cantarelli et al. 2025). However, data on governance indicators does not fully represent all countries in the world, with some LMICs prone to missing data or where data collection is impossible due to conflict or other extenuating circumstances (Bertelli et al. 2020). Furthermore, work on public administration reform remains tied to knowledge frameworks that are rooted in the experience of high-income countries — from an understanding of bureaucracy rooted in the Weberian ideal, to practices and designs modelled on high-income countries that LMICs trying to stimulate growth must emulate. These assumptions are problematic not only in their rigidity, but also in their failure to acknowledge that high-income countries are no more immune to state capture and corruption than any other country — though these might exhibit differently than in LMICs (Ismail 2025).

What is evident in assessing proposals for public sector reform is that South-to-South exchange remains undervalued. Our case for South-to-South exchange on public administration reform emerges from conversations about reform experiences in two countries, Pakistan and Montenegro. Research exchange between Eastern Europe and South Asia is limited — their contemporary political trajectories are quite different, with communist collectivism the dominant framework in the former Yugoslavia, whereas countries in the latter remained aligned with the capitalist bloc — despite some commitments (i.e., India) to non-alignment for a time. Population dynamics place very different demands on states in these regions, and experiences with international development stakeholders also vary. But in both Pakistan and Montenegro the public sector is the largest and most secure employer — arguably at the cost of the efficiency and quality of public services. In both contexts, bureaucratic politics is best understood through the lens of politicisation and patronage (Ali 2018; Meyer-Sahling, Schuster, and Toth 2025). Our interactions revealed that capacity issues in both countries exhibit several similarities, giving rise to learning opportunities with respect to public administration reform. Whereas high-income countries offer exemplars for institution design and administrative practice, South-to-South exchanges reveal a more realistic picture of reform design, implementation, and practice.

Recruitment, training, and performance management

Both countries face issues of bureaucratic capacity. At the end of Communist rule, circa 1989-92, Montenegro was dominated by a single political party, which contributed to the creation of the so-called party-state and political capture of state institutions. One of the European Union’s key demands for the accession process (planned for 2028) is for optimisation of the public service to reduce overall staffing levels, address issues related to a lack of merit-based recruitment (Sigma 2025), and improvement in the existing recruitment pool which currently comprises of individuals who require considerable training to perform within state structures.

Pakistan’s bureaucracy is significantly larger, serving a population of roughly 220 million, which is several times that of Montenegro’s. With the public sector being the largest formal employer in the country, these jobs are highly sought after as they promise pensions and relative job security. Capacity is a primary concern though — Pakistan’s bureaucracy is staffed by generalists at the senior levels, with the majority of recruits lacking the educational background and skills to work on policy development and implementation. Training needs are not met through civil service structures which remain hidebound and limited by red tape. Progression pathways are poorly defined across most of the bureaucracy and merit-based performance management processes are lacking or compromised by patronage politics (Ali 2025).

In both countries, those who follow the reform process in the public sector are aware that the same strategies and proposals are used repeatedly without learning from prior poor experience. This speaks to a lack of institutional memory, insufficient tracking and assessment of reform proposals and their implementation, and poor horizontal and vertical coordination across departments and tiers of government. In Montenegro, Sigma (2025) identifies limited strategic planning capacities and underdeveloped human resources management as significant issues with the public administration system. Despite more than 54,000 people employed in public service, there are significant gaps in many specific areas — for instance in the structures that will need to be established for management of EU funds upon joining, which is expected in 2028, revealing that the issue is not the lack of people, but lack of skills, internal organisation, coordination and readiness (Haxhi et al. 2025).

Another reason for the lack of institutional memory is high rates of bureaucratic turnover and exit in bureaucracies in both countries. In Montenegro, the Sigma 2025 report notes high turnover as a key issue. In Pakistan, tenure limits are set out for different categories of posts, but these are often ignored. Few bureaucrats will fulfil a three-year term, and in some cases will be transferred within a few months of being posted. This undermines work on PAR (performance assessment review) reforms that require sustained leadership and engagement, increases career instability induced by rapid turnovers, intensifies wider dissatisfaction with public sector employment, and drives exit from the services, often of capable officials, thus draining state capacity.

Attempting reform

Taken together, capacity concerns create the conditions for ongoing reforms — whether they are funded as part of the EU accession process in Montenegro or through international development stakeholders in Pakistan — to fall short. For instance, Pakistan’s attempts at introducing merit-based teacher recruitment are often stymied by the influence of politicians and bureaucrats exerting pressure to bypass rules and regulations in making appointments (Ali 2020). In this manner, policies are not uniformly implemented and are undermined even as they are introduced. In Montenegro, different institutional mechanisms have been trialled to enhance merit-based recruitment. State organisations and local governments have tightened up recruitment procedures, seeking to reduce corruption and encourage ethical conduct by encouraging integrity planning, independent monitoring and evaluation, restricting fresh recruitment prior to election, and introducing competency frameworks across bureaucratic tiers. However, like Pakistan, these measures have yet to show results. It remains unclear if the issue is one of implementation gaps (Bratu, Sotiropoulos, and Stoyanova 2017) where reform measures are not being followed with sufficient commitment and will, or if the selection of reform measures needs to be better tailored to local context.

A way forward

Bureaucratic practices — clientelist or otherwise — are embedded in environments that allow them to flourish, foremost cultural norms and patterns of behaviour in societies (Singer 2009). For this reason, attempting to solve issues of corruption or clientelism by using policy solutions from other societies with different social norms rarely succeeds (Andrews 2013; Grindle 2010). Therefore, policy solutions and practices transposed from established democracies with strong institutions, a history of stable democratic governance (even amidst backsliding), and higher incomes (Treisman 2007) are unlikely to show comparable results in countries of the Global South. Instead, where we might find common ground and opportunities to learn what works, or doesn’t work, in complex environments is in South-to-South exchanges on public administration reform. We discovered during our interactions just how similar many of the struggles faced by Montenegro and Pakistan are in administering the state and public services. Exchanging lessons learned and experiences in implementation of similar reforms in such contexts offer an opportunity to better construct reform proposals and design their implementation based on the real-world experiences of LMICs, thus carrying much greater potential than currently exploited for learning how best to manage public sector reform.

Sameen A. Mohsin Ali is an Associate Professor in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in the bureaucratic politics of Pakistan, showing that bureaucratic politics plays a key role in political and administrative (in)stability.

Maja Markovic obtained a Master’s degree in Public Administration in 2017 at the University of Birmingham, and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Montenegro. She has more than 10 years of experience working with international organisations and Montenegro-based NGOs in project management, public sector reform, public policy, and institutional development.

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