Changing “Public” in Public Services and Implications
The public service has long been central to public administration theories and practices, serving as a critical barometer for evaluating the success or failure of any state or government. In contemporary times, the concept of the public service has evolved significantly within the framework of the “new governance paradigm.” This shift was catalyzed by the fall of the former USSR and the simultaneous rise of neoliberal ideologies that advocated for a redefined role of the state in both the economy and governance.
Under the neoliberal doctrine, the state was envisioned as having a minimal role, resulting in an expanded governance landscape that challenged the state’s dominance in governance affairs. This expansion brought about two significant developments. First, government’s primary role shifted toward regulation, paving the way for the exploration of alternative models of service delivery, such as corporatization, privatization, lease contracting, identification, and commercialization of non-core functions.
Second, the broadened governance arena invited non-state and non-governmental actors to supplement government’s capacities and capabilities. This collaboration aimed to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of governance processes. Consequently, the evolving nature of the public service reflects the dynamic interplay of historical events, ideologies, and the changing landscape of governance.
From this historical and theoretical perspectives, it becomes immediately clear why the idea of the public service has equally gone through a similar rethinking such that it becomes also possible for service delivery by the public service to be undertaken by independent, voluntary and non-profit organizations and agencies. This begins to affect our understanding of what is “public” if the essential services that are meant to be delivered by the public service have now been either transferred to nonstate or private sector, or they are delivered through a public-private partnership (PPP) contract. Unfortunately, the understanding of the idea of the public service that operates in states like Nigeria derive from an almost fossilized version enshrined in critical legal instruments like the constitution and the public service rules and other legal instruments that govern the operational and administrative logic of the institution.
This therefore not only raises the prospect of a disjuncture between theoretical, administrative and practical concerns in the way the meaning of the public service has evolved. Put in other words, if the government fails to take notice of the changing connotation of what we call the public service, there is the probability that its understanding of its nature will always be lacking. This is because transforming the meaning and nature of the public service through the imperative of institutional and modernizing reforms are meant to make the public service more flexible and hence more efficient in the task of service delivery to the citizens.
This reflection then inevitably leads us to raising fundamental questions that no government can afford to smoothen over in the rush of political and developmental exigencies. These questions include: What is the “public” in the public service? What makes the “public” public? Are the public service and the public sector synonymous? What is the relationship between what is public and what is private? These are crucial questions that could assist a government in situating the fundamental significance of the public service, within the changing parameters for doing public administration across the world, and thus in adequately outlining the requisite reform frameworks that will greatly improve the capability readiness of the system to deliver goods and service.
The usual ways the public service is designated is functionally, through what we perceive the public service to be doing. And this includes (a) the public functions of government like the public healthcare, law enforcement, security, etc.; and (b) activities that are specifically performed to benefit the public, like education, road maintenance, and other infrastructural services. This descriptive assessment of what a public service does seems straightforward. But it does not do enough for our understanding of how the public service can become the engine room for transforming the citizens’ lives. One reason for this is that these activities that are ascribed to the government are not often in the domain of the government. Some of them can pass off as commercial activities provided by individuals or private organizations.
But more important is the argument that the public service should be denoted normatively—we understand the public service by what it should be doing, and what its structures, procedures and organizational modalities ought to be. What makes a public service speaks to a value judgment about what activities it should perform. For example, is the railway necessarily a public service even though it serves the public? Pharmacies serve the public, but should they not be a public service? This immediately tells us that what we call the public services do not necessarily fall within the purview of the government, even though the public sector is solely controlled by the government. Universities usually fall under the public sector, but are also usually provided by private independent actors and agencies.
First, public services are fundamentally provisions for the public, regardless of whether they come from the government or private entities. While the government plays a significant role, these services extend beyond it, involving non-state organizations. Second, the publicness of these services arises from carefully crafted public policies, reflecting government intentions for citizens. The public service’s core mission is to enhance welfare and well-being. Additionally, literature highlights the redistributive aspect, with a distinction between service payers and beneficiaries. Lastly, though not solely, the government bears the trust responsibility for delivering these services.
What lessons can we extract from these considerations about what defines the “public” and “service” aspects of the public service? Starting with our earlier discussion within the context of the new governance paradigm, it becomes evident that institutional reform must encompass both the government and the public sector, as well as non-state actors.
For the government, the primary challenge lies in deepening the institutional reform of the public service. This involves several significant steps, including implementing competency-based HR practices, instilling a culture of performance management and accountability, enhancing project management methodologies, revamping wage and incentive structures, establishing effective talent management systems, and solidifying the role of the senior executive service (SES) as the cornerstone for strengthening the system’s intelligence quotient (IQ).
This initial level of reform seamlessly leads to a second tier, which revolves around structurally articulating and enriching the professional environment. This facilitates the adoption of a public-private sector integrated governance model in line with global best practices. Achieving this entails two critical objectives: first, building the managerial and institutional capacities of the public service to ensure efficient service delivery, and second, reinforcing its collaborative capabilities for forging partnerships and networks.
These partnerships necessitate shared learning platforms that foster cohesive frameworks aligning corporate and public governance structures. In essence, the lessons drawn from these definitional considerations underscore the imperative of comprehensive reform efforts that encompass not only the public service itself but also its interactions with non-state entities and the broader governance landscape.
The second dimension of the institutional reform targeted at the public sector, and specifically the public service, is that there is a need to re-professionalize the public service and the public manager in ways to fit into the new partnership imperatives demanded by the new governance paradigm. This will require that the manager’s capacity for understanding and adapting to systems thinking, deploy big data for policy intelligence, create foresight techniques for generating scenarios that strengthen the policy design dynamics to be resilient is deepened sufficiently. The new public manager also needs composite competences to, one, be able to first manage third party service providers (through service contracts, grants to non-profit organizations, social impact bonds, and other contractual obligations which require a range of commercial, legal, and regulatory skills), and then learn to design contracts that embed performance indicators and deliverables which help in tracking values for investment; two, be better at smartly managing citizens engagement by leveraging the benefits of the social media, opinion research, user-data analytics, crowdsourcing, etc.; and finally be trained adequately in acquiring the skills needed in effectively managing the change management programs that facilitate proper implementation trajectories.
The other side of the reform expectation involves the participation of the nonstate and nongovernmental agencies and private sector professionals in the governance space. Given the difficulty that has been experience in the relational pattern between the public servants and private sector professionals, especially those we regard as cross-over professionals, there is the urgent need for the nonstate agencies and professionals to recognize the structural imperatives of the public service as a profession in its own right with its own unique code of practice and ethics. Secondly, reforms must be targeted at developing and enhancing collaborative parameters and structures that enable technocrats, professionals and bureaucrats to work productively together.
The Nigeria public service is the fulcrum that services the social contract between the government and the citizens. If a government must be developmental and democratic, the public service system must be the focus of ensuring that infrastructural development and public services are distributed effectively and efficiently to facilitate the well-being of the citizens.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
