Public Administration and Globalization: Enhancing Public-Private Collaboration

223 Pages·2006·1.48 MB·English

by  Publications Office

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND GLOBALIZATION:

ENHANCING PUBLIC-PRIVATE COLLABORATION
IN PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY

New Delhi, India 7 October 2003

In cooperation with the
Eastern Regional Organization
for Public Administration

United Nations

Division for Public Administration and Development Management
Department of Economic and Social Affairs

Public Administration and Globalization:

Enhancing Public-Private Collaboration
in Public Service Delivery

New Delhi, India 7 October 2003

In cooperation with the
Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration

United Nations
New York
The opinions expressed herein are the responsibilities of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations nor the
Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration

All rights reserved.
Table of Contents

Foreword

Pro-Poor Policy Processes and Institutions:
A Political Economic Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
M. ADIL KHAN

The Dilemma of Governance in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
JOSE GPE. VARGAS HERNANDEZ

Institutional Mechanisms for Monitoring International Commitments
to Social Development: The Philippine Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
MA. CONCEPCION P. ALFILER

Globalization and Social Development: Capacity Building for
Public-Private Collaboration for Public Service Delivery . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
AMARA PONGSAPICH

Trade Liberalization and the Poor: A Framework for Poverty
Reduction Policies with Special Reference to Some Asian
Countries including India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
SOMESH K. MATHUR

Government and Basic Sector Engagement in Poverty Alleviation:
Highlights of a Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
VICTORIA A. BAUTISTA

Private Sector Participation in Education Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
MALATHI SOMAIAH

Enhancing Public-Private Sector Collaboration in Public Service
Delivery: The Malaysian Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
VASANTHA DAISY RUTH CHARLES

Public-Private Collaboration in Public Service Delivery:
Hong Kong’s Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
JERMAIN T.M. LAM
Gender Policies and Responses Towards Greater
Women Empowerment in the Philippines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
PROSERPINA DOMINGO TAPALES

Modalities and Limiting Factors in Public-Private Collaboration
In the Delivery of Social Services: A Case in Philippine
Public Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
JOEL T. SAN LUIS

Public Private Partnership in Policy Innovation and Implementation:
Reflections on the Self-Assessment Scheme for Property Tax of
The Bangalore Municipal Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
S. RAGHUNATH AND CHIRANJIB SEN
FOREWORD

P artnership of the public sector with the private sector and civil society continue to be
a critical vehicle in the attainment of growth and sustainable human development.
The call for enhanced partnerships by the United Nations system and its development
partners remained an essential component at all international conferences and global
summits in the 1990s, including those on education, gender, the environment, children,
social development and human settlements. This culminated in the adoption of the
Millennium Declaration in 2000 and the promotion of the Millennium Development Goals.
Since then, partnership initiatives have been reinvigorated and strengthened at all major
international forums.

In an effort to improve the management of the public sector, public administration
has recognized the value and virtue of partnerships among the various sectors,
cooperating with different actors in the private and civil society sectors at the local,
national, regional and global levels to galvanize experience, knowledge, skills and to
utilize resources to effectively respond to public needs. Thus, partnerships constitute a
major element in the process of giving new life to public administration.

While the role of public sector in the delivery of public service remains
indispensable, it is now recognized that both the State and the private and civil sectors
have their distinct and mutually respective spheres of interest and activities and that
even in market economies. Each sector alone cannot be relied upon to deliver all
developmental needs, especially the Millennium Development Goals, nor can it
guarantee cost-effectiveness in the delivery of social services. Establishing a strategic
framework and finding the right role within which the partnership is dedicated to the
common goals of growth, quality, cost-effectiveness and equity are equally critical.

In this context, the United Nations Programme of Public Administration supported
the Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration (EROPA) in its 19th General
Assembly and Conference on “Public Administration and Globalization: Challenges,
Opportunities and Options,” with a specific focus on enhancing public-private
collaboration in public service delivery. This publication seeks to highlight the
experiences of various states and institutions in bringing together state and market
mechanisms to introduce new forms of producing and delivering public services which
were traditionally delivered through purely state mechanisms.

It is my hope that this publication will contributed to the debate on and to the
sharing of best practices in public-private collaboration for enhancing public service
delivery. The United Nations system is committed to support national Governments in
empowering public administration to play a vital role in strengthening and forging these
partnerships to better respond to public needs and for the achievement of the
Millennium Development Goals.

GUIDO BERTUCCI
Director
Division for Public Administration and Development Management
Department of Economic and Social Affairs

Pro-Poor Policy Processes and Institutions:
A Political Economic Discussion

M. ADIL KHAN*

Introduction

The paper argues that poverty reduction in any country is affected by the way
public policies are formulated and, more importantly, by the processes that contribute to
these policies, by the key actors of the process and indeed, by the world view and the
vested interests these actors represent.

It is against this backdrop that the paper further argues that the public policy
process concerning poverty begins with the way poverty is perceived, defined and
prioritized in a society. The paper also suggests that it is the Western schools of
thoughts on and approaches to “development” that mostly influence the strategies of
poverty reduction. Furthermore, the geo-politics of the day also influence how
“development” in general, and the strategy for poverty in particular, gets
conceptualized, defined and implemented.

In addition, poverty at its conceptual level seems to get defined more by the
symptoms rather than the causal relationships that contribute to the process. Viewing
poverty from their causal relationships highlights issues that are often systemic in
nature and are politically insightful. A radical priest in a Latin American country once
made this comment in the mid-seventies: “when I give food to poor people, they say I
am an angel. But when I ask why poor people do not have food, they say I am a
communist.” Let us begin with the politics of defining poverty.

Poverty is defined in a variety of ways, but the traditional definition of poverty is
based on income – those who live on less than $1.00 a day are poor. Others have
defined poverty in terms of non-income attributes as well. The definition of poverty and
its perceived notion, especially at the policy level, is important for determining the size,
the depth, the causes of, and, indeed, the solutions to poverty.

In 1988 in Philippines, the World Bank, using the income definition, estimated the
incidence of poverty at 35 per cent. For the same year, the Social Weather Station, a
non-government research institute that used the “self-perception evaluation

* Chief, Socio-economic Governance and Management Branch, Division for Public Administration and
Development Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), New York,
USA ([email protected]). The paper represents the views of the author and not the United Nations. Further, the
paper is a modified version of a presentation made by the author at the EROPA Meeting held during the 5-11
October 2003 in New Delhi, India. The author is grateful to Mr. Jay De Vera of UNDESA for his comments on
the draft.
methodology” or the poor’s perception of poverty that combine both income and non-
income indicators, estimated the incidence at 48 per cent, even though the poverty line
estimated by the poor themselves was less than that of the World Bank’s in this survey.
The survey revealed that while the poor regard income as important, they regarded non-
income factors to be equally, if not more, important. In this survey, the poor put much
higher weight on factors such as land tenure rights, access to employment, access to
market, health, education, and protection from physical violence.

The differences in definition of poverty imply very different approaches to poverty
reduction; most governments tend to target the symptoms and not the root causes of
poverty. The latter strategy entails significant institutional reform and political
empowerment of the poor. Thus, the tendency is to avoid the reform strategy of poverty
reduction. It is now on record that most poverty alleviation initiatives of the eighties in
Philippines that were implemented through unhelpful institutional arrangements failed
badly, culminating into mass frustration, and, accompanied by other sources of
resentments such as inequality, rampant corruption, etc., lead to the overthrow of the
Marcos regime.

The non-income definition of poverty often relates to issues that are political
economic in nature and exposes institutional arrangements that tend to expose
elements of gross inequity. For example, a recent study in Bangladesh records “. . .that
many criminal justice laws and practices are anti-poor, even though more than a third of
Bangladeshis live in extreme poverty” (UNDP, Bangladesh 2005).

Public institutions, and the public sector entities that work as intermediaries
between the government and the people and are responsible for the formulation and
implementation of public policies and programs, are often not immune from the political
economic environment of a country within which they function, and are rather part of it.
Their form, shape and method of delivery of services, the nature and extent of their
engagement with the poor (if any) and the policy-making processes, all of these
originate from the existing political and governance configuration of a country. The
poor’s participation and representation of their interests in the policy process very much
depends, on the one hand, on the quality and depth of democracy in a country and, on
the other, the space given ordinary citizens to enter those decision-making processes.
Further, exogenous factors such as donor preferences and their schools of thoughts on
poverty and development also play important roles in shaping public policies and policy
processes.

In addition, since the mid-eighties, globalization and liberalization have been
creating new equations, and challenging and altering the existing institutional
relationships in every country, not always to the benefit of the poor. A recently held
seminar at the Columbia University of New York (CUNY) that summed up the discussions
of a two-year long seminar series on human security concluded that globalization and
liberalization, spearheaded by the coalition of Western industrial nations, the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and World Trade Organization, are eroding
the state’s economic power. What is at risk, according to this seminar, is that a market-
based value system is overtaking the value system based on social, economic and
political rights of citizens – rich and poor, male and female.

Lately, the rise of civil society organizations and their movements, both nationally
and internationally, has also created another kind of dynamic in the public policy

2 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: ENHANCING PUBLIC-PRIVATE COLLABORATION IN PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY