Public Administrative Reform and Management Innovation for Developing Countries

Introduction All too frequently, conventional wisdom confuses the application of management fashion or fad, usually as promoted in the rich countries, with ‘management innovation’. This is a conceptual error that can, and frequently does, lead to serious practical mistakes, particularly in developing countries. It is an error because innovation simply connotes novelty and change. The clear concomitant of this being that what may be regarded as old in one setting may be seen as new in another, and vice versa. The error can be especially serious for developing countries because the gap between what happens to be in vogue in, say, America or England or Japan, and management elsewhere, is at its widest when comparisons are made between management practice in these (rich) countries and the poor countries of the developing world. In many developing countries the underlying fundamentals of good organisation and service delivery, which are presupposed by management fashion or fad, do not work as they should, or may be missing altogether. Moreover, the combination of severe resource scarcity and (often) extreme poverty clearly means that when such mistakes are made the costs to developing countries can be considerable.