To be or not to be (responsive): The curious case of the civil service of Bangladesh

Let us start by considering the following two examples -

Case A: 

Getting services from the land office in Bangladesh has always been challenging. These offices are dominated by the middlemen and agents and often, they work with the government servants functioning within the office to make the lives of the service recipients extremely difficult. 

To address this situation, in 2015, one Assistant Commissioner (Land) introduced a bold and unique initiative. To ensure that the service recipients can't directly get in touch with him, he set up a booth just beside the main office building, himself sat in that office and met the people who had come to the land office while making every effort to solve the minor problems instantly. 

This initiative was called "Matir Maya" and this allowed the citizens to gain access to land offices without facing any difficulties and to have their problems solved. 

Building on this initiative, another AC (Land) launched a mobile app to provide different types of land related services to the people. This has gained popularity throughout the country and allowed people to pay land development tax through this app. 

Case B: 

In March 2020, an Assistant Commissioner (Land), while raising awareness about Covid-19 prevention, saw a few elderly people without any mask and asked them to hold their ears in public as punishment. The AC (land) also took a picture of the incident, and the photo went viral through social media, drawing harsh criticism from all corners. The AC (Land) was then transferred, and the UNO later apologised to the victims.

These two examples, interestingly, are not mere exceptions. There is way too many positive anecdotal evidence that indicates that many bureaucrats working at the local level are trying to be responsive, are reaching out to people, and making efforts to solve problems while taking under consideration the point of views of the masses. 

At the same time, there are also way too many negative incidents where the bureaucrats decided to abuse their power, ignore people's demands, and even participated in corrupt activities (allegedly). 

These two contradictory realities have now shaped the entire administrative reality of Bangladesh, and this is an important 'performance paradox' that needs to be explained - how do these two contrasting traits coexist within a single reality? 

This is an important question to analyse because unpacking this paradox will eventually help us to determine future administrative reform strategies.

It is important to note that until now, very few efforts have been taken to explain and explore the positive changes that are taking place within the bureaucracy. Instead, several studies have identified the bureaucracy of the country as an elitist organisation that has embraced a colonial legacy, is non-responsive and is resistant to change. These studies, therefore, can only explain the 'negative performance' of the bureaucracy and thus, cannot explain the presence of two contrasting traits.

However, based on these studies, one can argue that the 'positive' performances are mere exceptions, and the bureaucracy has remained what it always has been - an authoritarian organ that is willing to rule instead of serving the people. 

But the problem is, as mentioned above, there are way too many positive case-studies to ignore. These examples indicate that Akbar Ali Khan's Gresham Law Syndrome will probably not apply here because clearly the 'bad' bureaucrats are not driving the 'good' bureaucrats away. Instead, they are co-existing- both physically and ideationally.

One possible way to explain this paradox is to simply conclude that it's more about people in charge and their characteristics. In other words, bureaucracy is being responsive and non-responsive simply because there are 'good' bureaucrats and 'bad bureaucrats' where the 'good' ones are responsible for 'positive' stories and the bad ones are responsible for the 'negative' ones. 

An Assistant Commissioner (land) in Jessore drew much criticism in 2020 for punishing two elderly people by making them hold their ears in public. Photo: Collected

However, this explanation is too simplistic for two reasons- first of all, it is difficult to prove that having both the 'good' or 'bad' bureaucrats within an organisation is a new or recent phenomenon and indeed, it is likely that both the 'maintainer' of status-quo and the change-agents have been within the bureaucracy of Bangladesh for ages. 

What is different now is the fact that the change-agents are making their voices heard and they are indeed making an impact. Secondly, related to the first point, the simple explanation does not clarify how the actors functioning within the bureaucracy are interacting with the formal and informal rules that guide their behaviour and how that is affecting the overall outcome.

Another possible explanation can be built if we conclude that this contradiction is a reflection of the transition that Bangladeshi society is going through. Scholars of public administration have argued in the past that societies that are going through a transition, often embody characteristics of both the modern and traditional societies. 

Based on that, it can be argued that the duality that we see in administrative performance in Bangladesh is a reflection of the duality that defines transitional societies. However, this argument has two limitations - first, it overemphasises the role of society and societal transformation in determining the characteristics of administration and in doing so, ignores the impact of political system in determining the performance of the bureaucracy and secondly, it also fails to show how the actors working within the office interact with institutions or societal traits in shaping the administration's performance.

On the other hand, we may decide to focus too much on the positive stories and henceforth, try to make an argument that bureaucracy is performing better because a broad transformational institutional change has taken place and the overall culture of the bureaucracy has undergone significant transformation. However, several studies that have been carried out over the last years found no proof of such large-scale institutional changes. In other words, the 'good' and the 'bad' performers are working within the same institutional rules and that is why understanding the pattern of interaction between actors and institutions is important.

The discussion so far helps us in identifying the following key issues that should be emphasised while understanding the 'performance paradox'- first of all, in developing a broader understanding of administrative reality, the political context cannot be ignored. It is therefore essential to understand how the existing political system is allowing the bureaucracy of the country to enjoy and exercise a certain level of discretion that allows them to shape up their pattern of interaction with the citizens. 

Secondly, it is important to understand that the changes that we are observing right now have taken place within a context where the formal and informal rules of the game have not undergone major changes. 

What this means is, the individual bureaucrats are not interested in challenging the institutional structure and instead, they are simply trying to bend the rules or are interpreting these rules based on the discretionary power allowed to them by the political reality. 

Thirdly, whereas personal traits or characteristics of the individual bureaucrats cannot completely explain the gradual change that we are observing, we, however, should not completely exclude it from our equation. 

Instead, what we need to do is to identify what specific characteristics of the individual bureaucrats are fostering change and how these bureaucrats are working through the existing rules of the game to be responsive.

If we take under consideration these key takeaways, it actually helps us in developing a framework to understand how the two contradictory realities are co-existing. In unpacking the 'performance paradox', our starting point should be the assumption that the bureaucracy of the country is changing but this change is not a transformational one. Rather, this is a gradual, slow-paced change which is not necessarily relying on exogenous shocks. 

In fact, what we are witnessing here is an endogenous institutional change driven by the individual bureaucrats who are utilising the opportunities offered through the political reality. How do these conclusions explain the curious case of Bangladesh? In my opinion, it does so in the following way -

First of all, it is important to take under consideration the change in political system that has taken place over the last 10 to 12 years. As the current regime is focusing on centralising power, it is gradually weakening the power and authority of the local elected offices while empowering the administrative officials. In other words, a partnership has developed between the ruling elites at the Centre and the bureaucracy, and it is important to understand the nature, purpose and goal of this partnership. 

To stay in power, the AL-led regime clearly needs to legitimise its rule and this 'effort to legitimise' is being performed not by offering a regular alternation of power but by drawing attention to its 'performance'. 

That is why centrally and globally, the 'development' narrative has been built and is being nurtured, and for that same reason, at the local level, the regime at least tries to ensure access to services while making sure that this access will not jeopardise its control on power. 

This political calculation and reality (and the attempt to de-politicise local elected offices) encourages the ruling party to allow the local level bureaucracy to exercise a certain level of bureaucratic discretion. Whereas discretion will always be 'bounded', this particular discretion offered to the bureaucracy has a certain boundary - the bureaucrats can innovate and support service delivery to help people and use discretionary power to that end, but they are not allowed to use that discretion in challenging the regime. Indeed, the condition for using discretion in innovating service delivery mechanisms is unconditional support to the regime. This is a unique discretion that allows innovation but does not always tolerate 'speaking truth to the power'.

Secondly, within this new and emerging political reality, the nature of actors joining the civil service has changed. We now have a group of neo-bureaucrats who have lived through the democratic experiences of the 90s, understood the significance of CSOs and NGOs, who are tech-savvy and who are more than willing in interacting with the people living at the local level. 

Having said that, the bureaucracy also contains several actors who have gone through the same experiences but have not really embraced the 'new value sets' that have encouraged others to 'break through the bureaucracy'. In other words, we have two different sets of actors at the local level who have got the opportunity of utilising 'bounded discretion' offered by the regime. I have named them 'opportunists' and 'innovators'.

Thirdly, the opportunists or the innovators do not function in the vacuum. Within the organisation, the formal and informal rules, which have not changed much, affect, and constrain their action. However, there are some certain differences. The innovators though do not challenge the institution or do not make an effort to transform it, they try to use the rules and even bend it if necessary to 'innovate' service delivery mechanisms. 

In other words, using the discretion offered to them by the regime, they either use the existing rules or stretch them or bend them to provide services in a more meaningful way. On the other hand, the opportunists use the same discretionary power and use the institutions for achieving personal gains.

Let me provide one specific example. 

The GoB (more specifically the a2i) has been trying to popularise social media, especially Facebook, as a means to reaching out to the masses for a while. Almost all the UNO offices of the countries were encouraged to open Facebook pages, and interact with the people. 

In terms of determining the modus operandi of this interaction, the bureaucrats were allowed to exercise significant discretion. Interestingly, two different trends emerged- the innovators used their discretionary power and interacted with citizens, worked together in identifying problems, sought their suggestions and solved them. 

That is why we have seen the famous "Jail Canal Story" of Barisal where in response to a student's post in Facebook, the district administration took action to recover the canal from the encroachers; we have seen government officials respond to Facebook posts of female students of medical college where they shared stories and pictures of their inhuman living conditions; and, we have seen UNOs respond to several posts regarding child marriage and take action accordingly. 

These are the few cases where the innovators used their discretionary power to provide services in an effective and efficient manner. 

On the other hand, there are also several examples where the civil servants either did not maintain a Facebook page, used that page simply to advertise their daily activities, and decided simply to ignore the comments/ suggestions of people. 

This is where the opportunists use the discretionary power for their own interest and benefits. This example illustrates how and why the performance of the bureaucracy differs. This is a perfect example of the 'performance paradox' which is essentially the outcome of a dialectical interaction among political context, institutions, and actors. 

In its simplest sense, the performance paradox exists because individual bureaucrats, based on their personal characteristics, are interpreting the formal and informal rules in their own ways, while utilising the opportunities offered by the political climate.

We need to take this under consideration in devising future administrative reform strategies.

Asif M Shahan

The Author is an Associate Professor of University of Dhaka