Why do governments often perform poorly and what causes them to improve? This text discusses good governance in developing countries. Current mainstream development literature is concerned with how governments fail to deliver public services and theory is built from this. The text formulates advice by drawing on cases of good performance and in so doing reveals how some of the current advice goes wrong.
The arguments are developed from four case studies involving programs in different sectors. These programs were carried out by the Ceara state government in north-eastern Brazil whose performance turned rapidly from bad to good in the mid 1980s.
Ceara is part of Brazil’s poorest region where one third of the population lives in absolute poverty. The state government had a clientelistic method of governing resulting in poor quality administration. However in the period 1987-93 the Ceara economy had a 3.4 per cent growth rate. Four cases of good performance that were introduced at this time are considered, these are:
- Rural preventative health program. The program hired 7,300 community health agents, tripling vaccination coverage and reducing the infant death rate by a third.
- Business extension and public procurement from small firms. The state department of industry and commerce redirected 30 per cent of state expenditure on goods and services to firms in the informal sector. This demand-driven assistance had lasting and developmental effects on the producers and regions respectively.
- Employment-creating public works construction. The Department of Social Action gave work to one million unemployed farmers during the 1987 drought. Clientelism was greatly reduced from previous schemes and jobs and relief supplies were delivered more rapidly.
- Agriculture was the only sector to receive major funding and technical assistance from international donors and central government. However, there are no striking achievements. Successful small farmer associations are noted to identify lessons for state policy.
The search for explanations into why these schemes were successful has produced five central themes. They led to a different structured work environment that in some cases challenges the ‘expert’ view about how such services should be organised. These themes are:
- Government workers in all cases demonstrated unusual dedication to their jobs. They reported feeling more appreciated by their communities.
- Government contributed to this sense of recognition through prizes for good performance, public screening methods for new recruits and public information campaigns.
- Workers carried out a larger variety of tasks than usual, often voluntarily. They were able to provide more customised service as they had greater autonomy and discretion.
- Workers looked to perform better due to the trust placed in them by their clients and the scrutiny from the communities in which they worked. This forced civil servants to be accountable without pressures from supervisors or other monitoring bodies.
- The cases displayed a more complex path to improved local government than the current thinking about decentralisation. Improvement of municipal government and the strengthening of civil society were the result of a new activism by central government.
