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CASE STUDY ON PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND CIVIL SERVICE REFORM UNDP CAMBODIA 1. Description of political and economic context (1 page max). Ravaged by almost twenty years of war, massive and unprecedented losses of human lives, rural and urban infrastructure, loss of agricultural potentials, and wracked by political instability and insecurity, Cambodia, with the assistance of the international community has begun to emerge from the painful legacy of its past. With the ending of armed conflict the most serious obstacle to poverty reduction has been removed and an opportunity for economic reform and social progress has been created. Since 1993, the Royal Government of Cambodia has made important strides in re-establishing political and economic stability. Various institutions of the country's governance system have been established and a comprehensive governance reform program embodied in the Governance Action Plan (see Section 3) is now being implemented to strengthen the foundations for sustainable human development. While the private sector remains relatively small, recent economic reform measures are beginning to spur private sector activities and attract foreign direct investment in the service and industrial sectors. Civil society is becoming increasingly visible and engaged. There are now over 400 nongovernment organizations in the country. Since the late 1998, Cambodia has achieved high economic growth under a conducive macroeconomic environment. Fiscal revenue has improved, stability in both the inflation rate and the exchange rate have been maintained and are now aligned with IMFs recommendations. However, the Cambodian economy continues to be heavily aid dependent and, despite the absence of reliable data, there are signs that economic growth during the past decade has not produced any significant poverty reduction. Indeed, there are some signs that the situation is worsening reduced per capita consumption (measured in Riels); fewer public health facilities and rising infant and child mortality; poor education outcomes; increasing population pressure on cultivable land with rising rural underemployment due to labour-force entry of baby boomers and lack of growth in non-farm employment. Increased vulnerability of some, resulting in part from Cambodias war legacy and the threat posed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, are also important factors for poverty in Cambodia. The critically affected economic prospects following the anti Thai riots and SARS situation in early 2003 as well as the political impasse following the national elections in July 2003, has demonstrated that the Cambodian economy remains vulnerable and the task to rebuild a country shattered by three decades of civil strife in a fragile governance environment with severe capacity constraints remains daunting. 2. Description of country-specific problem and challenges in the area of public sector management (1 page max).

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The legacies of decades of war, the Khmer Rouge regime and the accompanying breakdown of society have resulted in several major challenges in Cambodia. Among these are the abnormal demographic structure and the impact of the genocide on the quality of human resources. While other 20th century genocides were ethnically and/or politically motivated, Cambodias genocide was mainly ideological and targeted intellectuals, especially teachers, and Buddhist monks who were accused of holding ideas at odds with the isolationist and peasant-oriented revolutionaries. Urban people were turned into farmers and all vestiges of cosmopolitanism and commercialism ruthlessly suppressed. While the decade of Vietnamese occupation resulted in reconstruction of schools and extensive training of professionals and skilled workers (in Eastern Europe), resources for primary and secondary education remained limited. In the 1990s a few former exiles have returned home. However, nearly three decades after the genocide Cambodia still suffers more than many other developing countries from an acute shortage of people with high levels of technical and professional skills. This shortage is a unique feature of Cambodian society that cannot be solved in the short-term. Furthermore, Cambodia is a country where the reality of the State with a functioning modern public administration is only 10 years or so old. Instead, power structures are based on informal tributary processes, using the State for predatory purposes and resulting in a heavily politicised civil service. The combination of a weak rule of law, and the lack of a tradition of political accountability have created a society in which governance is generally weak and competing parallel regulatory frameworks to the State are well and alive with only few possibilities for the poor to effectively influence policy decisions. The large influx of foreign money following the arrival of the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), and the continued high levels of external assistance covering nearly all of the investment budget and important recurrent expenditures in the National Budget have created a heavy burden of coordination on the government as well as massive distortions on the labour market and in the civil service. In other words, below-subsistence salaries force civil servants into pursuing donorsubsidized activities, moonlighting, corruption and other rent-seeking activities which detract from their effectiveness and accountability in carrying out their duties.1 The low remuneration in the civil service remains a key constraint in reforming public sector management and efficiency in support of overall poverty reduction, and the need for a comprehensive civil service salary reform raising the average salaries to subsistence compatible levels is increasingly becoming apparent. In this context, and where feasible, broadening of the tax revenue base, complemented with improving the administration and enforcement of tax collection, and anti-smuggling initiatives are key considerations as pro-poor sources for raising revenues ahead of tax rate increases. Likewise, civil service downsizing are being advocated by a number of donors such as the World Bank. However,
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Although the average wage of civil servants is well below the minimum paid to garment workers, data indicate that civil servants are generally among the highest income group in Cambodia.

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emphasis should not be placed only on downsizing the civil service in order to increase the wages for the remaining as this is politically sensitive and would only provide insignificant payback. In stead or in addition, the issue of tackling the incentive and capacity distortions created by donor supplementary allowances to skilled civil servants needs to be addressed comprehensively as the aggregated donor payments to civil servants involved in donor projects constitute significant indirect budget support. The challenge of increasing efficiency, transparency and accountability in the Government institutions requires a balanced understanding of the Cambodian reality and sophisticated analysis in order to deal with sensitive issues, and the existing web of formal and informal institutional arrangements that make the main political parties more powerful than the government structures they represent. 3. Analysis of approach taken by UNDP and its partners (5 pages max). Since the General Elections conducted under the aegis of UNTAC in May 1993, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) has emphasised the importance of the institutional basis of national development. The RGC views the promotion of good governance as an essential pre-requisite to sustainable socio-economic development and social justice. In the pursuit of this overall objective, a Governance Action Plan (GAP) was finalized in January 2001 and serves as the road map to guide the reform process and coordinate the various governance reform initiatives of the Government. The GAP identifies different categories of reforms where actions are likely to be critical to Cambodia's development over the near and medium-term, involving crosscutting areas where improvements are fundamental prerequisites for a functioning government and for the basic rules that underlie a robust economy and society: (1) judicial and legal reform aiming at establishing basic rules of fairness and predictability; (2) public finance aiming at providing the financial underpinnings through which all governmental activities must take place; (3) public administration aiming at increasing the effectiveness of government and its employees in carrying out public programs; (4) anti-corruption aiming at establishing the framework of behavioural rules that set standards of probity in economic, social and political life; and (5) gender equity, which is critical to the Government's objectives of poverty alleviation and social justice. Under this overall framework, the multi-year (1999-2003) National Programme for Administrative Reform (NPAR) outlines three main phases articulated along four axes: (1) strengthening the rule of law; (2) good governance for service provision; (3) enhancing the civil service management; and (4) management of changes. The objectives of the NPAR is to adapt the Administration to the needs and means of the nation and to turn the civil service into an effective partner for the social and economic development of the country and an efficient provider of services to all citizens. The implementation of the four NPAR strategic areas are sequenced in three successive phases: Phase I will target preliminary and priority activities which strengthen the foundation of the public sector; Phase II will involve activities of institutional restructuring, reorganization and corresponding staff redeployment; and Phase III will include activities

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that rationalize structures and procedures at all levels of Government, and develop competence, responsibilities and efficiency of civil servants through comprehensive capacity building. To support the overall efforts of the RGC to promote good governance and create an environment for peace, justice and development, UNDP Cambodia has been actively involved with public administrative reform since 1994. In direct support of the NPAR, UNDP has provided assistance to the Council of Administrative Reform (CAR) aiming at: (i) Strengthening the capacities of the CAR Secretariat to deal effectively with strategic planning, policy development, donor coordination, national consensus building and strategic management of the NPAR programme. Facilitating the implementation of priority reform initiatives and sub-programmes as well as the development of implementation plans. Support to conceptualization and preparation of the Priority Mission Group (PMG) scheme to accelerate reforms and increase the efficiency of public service delivery in priority areas of government administration2.

(ii)

(iii)

In this respect, a number of noteworthy results have been achieved in support of the consolidation of the public service foundations in areas such as establishing a new classification and remuneration regime, preparing the Priority Mission Group (PMG) scheme, human resource management and development, preparation of tools for organisation of the work within the administration, and capacity development of the CAR Secretariat. However, overall progress in the public administrative reforms has been severely constrained by many factors leading to a decision to review UNDPs PAR/CSR activities as will be elaborated in sections five and six below. Based on a productive partnership with the government as well as other donors, UNDP has and is also playing a leading policy definitional role in the area of decentralization in support of the government's SEILA3 programme being the successor to the Cambodia Area Rehabilitation and Regeneration (CARERE) projects from 1991-2000. The SEILA programme is a national effort to achieve poverty alleviation through improved local governance. It is the collective responsibility of an inter-ministerial body, the SEILA Task Force (STF), and has included a gradually increasing number of provinces since 1996 reaching full national coverage in 2003. UNDP is also contributing to improving participatory local governance for
2

The PMG approach aims at promoting results-based management and capacity development within a systematic and transparent setup, by providing financial incentives to teams of government officials based on their performance in predefined key sectors of reform.
3

SEILA is a Khmer word meaning foundation stone. Drawing from the experiences of CARERE1, the SEILA program with the support of CARERE2 was established in 1995 as a pilot experiment in decentralized planning, financing and management of rural development to support the Royal Government of Cambodias (RGC) strategy for rural development. Starting in 1996 with the pilot implementation of local level planning and investments in 4 communes in 2 provinces, the SEILA program has since expanded progressively in geographic scope and coverage. Today, SEILA covers all of Cambodias 24 provinces comprising 1,621 communes. With the support of the multi-donor PLG project, SEILA has evolved as the RGCs platform for implementing its decentralization reform program.

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socio-economic development and poverty alleviation in Cambodia through the development and implementation of policies and strategies that enhance the capacities of local stakeholders. Finally, a number of other development partners in Cambodia are involved in public administrative and civil service reform. Many donors are involved directly in sector specific reforms such as WHO in health and UNICEF in education. Some of these activities are also relevant for the sector wide initiatives, including operational reviews and the studying and testing of alternative service delivery mechanisms. Other donors like the ADB and the IMF are engaged in improving the overall macroeconomic, fiscal and monetary frameworks for expenditure management. And a number of donors are directly engaged in activities relating to overall public administrative and civil service reforms. This includes the World Bank that has provided significant support to specific activities such as conducting a civil service census and the creation of an automated payroll database. The World Bank is also involved in a comprehensive study programme on selected areas such as the labor market, and in designing and preparing an economic and public sector capacity building programme involving extensive training and establishing a learning/training centre. A number of bilateral donors such as the French and Australian governments are also providing targeted assistance to public sector reforms. This includes support for developing a human resource development policy. In Cambodia, the policy dialogue between the government and its main national development partners is organized under the Consultative Group (CG) mechanism and is centered around nine benchmarks: 1) key components for enacting legal and judicial reform in place; 2) visible actions taken to fight corruption; 3) coverage of implementation of Procurement Sub-decree (1995) extended; 4) forest concession system rationalized on basis of sustainable forestry management plans; 5) legal framework for community-based natural resources management strengthened; 6) budgetary disbursements to social sectors improved; 7) declared actions to support HIV/AIDS prevention implemented; 8) civil service reform plan updated consistent with Medium Term Expenditure Framework; and 9) revenue mobilization strengthened through broadening collection of taxes and fees. To support the policy dialogue and monitor progress on the implementation of the benchmarks, a number of donor and government working groups have been established for governance, including demobilization, the social sector, natural resources management, fiscal reform and public administration. The working groups report to the annual CG meeting. UNDP is co-chairing the PAR Working Group and have been facilitating the dialogue on the monitoring of the benchmarks and the coordination of support to the government between different donor activities. The benchmarks have proved valuable to develop sector specific progress indicators and focusing the policy dialogue on reform bottlenecks and under/over funding of particular areas. 4. Possible linkages with other areas of intervention (gender, HIV/AIDS, poverty, environment) (2 pages max).

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Most of UNDPs other areas of intervention all have a bearing on the support to public administrative and civil service reform and vice versa. This includes specifically support to strengthen both legislative and judicial institutions in addition to other forms of reform for the executive institutions such as macroeconomic and fiscal policy reform. Empowering the other branches of government is essential to make Cambodias executive institutions more transparent and accountable while creating a new culture of checks and balances that is based on rights and obligations. Within the RGCs governance reform agenda, UNDP is providing support to the capacity development of the Parliament and Senate with a view to strengthening parliamentary legislative and oversight functions as an effective counter balance vis--vis the executive in the policy making process. This includes capacity development for MPs and enhancing efficiency of parliaments administration and procedures. Additionally, UNDP is supporting the RGCs efforts in increasing the capacity of the judiciary and the courts to act independently, uphold the rule of law and ensure equity and access to justice. This has mainly been done in partnership with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) through guiding and training of judges and court staff. In addition, discussions are ongoing on how UNDP can support Cambodias legal and judicial reform (LJR) by building constituencies to advocate for the advancement of LJR, develop capacities within key actors and institutions of the reform process, and mobilize resources from the international community to support the government in cooperation with the Office of Legal Affairs of the UN Secretariat to effectively host and operate the Extraordinary Chambers. Finally, via a regional programme on the macroeconomics of poverty reduction, UNDP supports the development of the government's overall capacity to formulate and implement sound pro-poor macroeconomic policies in the fiscal and monetary areas and to manage public finances more effectively. This also provides supports to the government in its deliberations with the International Financial Institutions, including in relation to civil service salary reform. 5. Lessons Learned from the UNDP intervention (3 pages max). UNDPs institutional capacity development support for public administrative reform has targeted both top-down strategic reform planning as well as decentralized reform implementation. At the same time, one of the overall conclusions currently being reviewed in the CO following the recent operational closure of the public administrative reform project is the need to integrate both more coherently as will also be discussed in the next section. Below, lessons learned from both PAR and decentralization will be discussed as they relate to each other. However, as the lessons learned overlap conceptually, they are difficult to separate textually too. Overall, while the public administrative reform project was originally designed to match UNDPs niche in public administrative reforms, the lack of buy-in from other donors, and the lack of careful coordination vis--vis

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other reform areas contributed to a loss of focus, dispersed activities and weak linkages to other activities. Some of these shortcomings derive from the original design and the ambitiousness of the projects Immediate Objectives [old terminology] that were not matched sufficiently by the envisioned outputs, nor matched by the resources mobilized, and not sufficiently positioned vis--vis other reform areas like public finance. In contrast, the SEILA/PLG program is acknowledged as one of UNDPs genuine success stories. It is one of few initiatives to have made a successful transition from rehabilitation to a post-conflict project (19921995). It is also a successful example of moving from pilot project experimentation in decentralized planning, financing and local development to become a policy informing programme supporting the implementation of the decentralisation reform programme in Cambodia (1996-2003). LESSON LEARNED #1: Strategic constituency building is crucial to generate support for and manage complex systems change processes. The original design of the PAR project document failed to cast CAR as the convenor of a consensus process that places responsibility for the design of change with those that have to make the change and live with the consequences; failed to support the reflection of a vision of Cambodian governance as the foundation of the administrative reform; and reflected weak understanding of the management of complex systems change and the need for a strategic approach towards constituency building. As a consequence, CAR continues to have a precarious role as an interministerial body with only limited policy directive competencies and limited success in building a strategic PAR management constituency. In contrast, the CARERE/SEILA programmes based themselves on a structured participatory approach to development planning and implementation of community projects that matched identified priorities with local needs, fostered local ownership and support, and provided a forum for coordination. This approach provided a concrete link between concept development and implementation. Furthermore, these participatory bottom-up processes played key role in the reconciliation process by bringing conflicting communities to discuss development concerns, identify priorities and solutions, and implement projects together thereby rebuilding confidence and mutual trust shattered by the long history of conflict and violence in Cambodias society. The extension of capacity development activities to other local stakeholders such as NGOs and small private contractors for rural infrastructure also helped develop the much needed local capacity, and helped built a constituency and partnerships critical to the implementation of the complex and comprehensive programmes. LESSON LEARNED #2: PAR needs to be flexibly linked to the broader reform process. The PAR project document addressed a series of discrete administrative efficiency-enhancing and cost-cutting reform tasks. While each of these tasks was needed to underpin the reform, treating them separately and as unrelated to the larger task of governance system reform has led to

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confusion and lack of coherence. At the same time, efficiency improvements in public sector management need to be positioned within a wider account and vision of overall governance reform. Likewise, flexibility may have been seen as necessary to respond to an evolving situation, but it also provided a mismatch between the project intervention and the reform agenda due to a lack of coherently and progressively developing work plans. To ensure the linkages and situate activities properly, the need for reforms to be country-driven and guided by national leadership and ownership is crucial. For SEILA, the flexibility in the project design and implementation allowed the project to act in a timely and decisive manner. Given the experimental and process-oriented nature of the project, a rigid and detailed plan would have been too restrictive, impeding the key operational devise of constantly revising and adapting to the issues and challenges that emerge. At the same time, SEILA developed and implemented simple systems and procedures for the flow of funds, accounting and bidding/contracting that promoted transparency and accountability among the various partners. However, for such flexibility to become part of the success of the approach a dedicated constituency is critical as was discussed above. Despite the high risks associated with the program both in its design and the volatile political and economic environment within which SEILA was and is implemented, the core donors lead by UNDP, SIDA and later DFID were willing to take risks and took a long-term view by providing considerable contributions and technical support. The development of broad-based partnerships also played an important role in building support, enhancing complementarity of initiatives at the local level, and leveraging the project activities through the mobilization of resources. This again, provides a strong contrast to the PAR project where the lack of buy-in from the donors resulted in severe under-funding and, instead, led to separate donor funded activities in support of bits and pieces of the NPAR and an overall lack of coherence between various donor activities. LESSON LEARNED #3: PAR is a long-term and inherently political process that can be guided and informed by careful piloting. A key conclusion is that public administrative reform takes time. And compared to sector specific reforms in line departments, results on overall strategic reform planning are not easily discernible. At the same time, overall strategic reform is inherently political and requires careful negotiation, planning, coordination, timing, and sequencing vis--vis other reform processes as results in one area often constitute necessary prerequisites for other areas. This does not mean attacking all the problems at once but allowing for an overall staggered approach carefully monitored and negotiated along the way. And in this respect, it is also important to facilitate donor collaboration in order to provide consistent support and guidance to the government. Contrary to the top-down strategic reform planning, the step-by-step pilot approach used by SEILA combined with a strong implementation management platform (the SEILA Task Force Secretariat) has proven successful in pioneering and demonstrating successful concepts that have informed policy

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development and supported effective institutionalization. For PAR, the reason for the lack of strong relations to other reform agendas partially follows from the lack of dedicated project management due to a variety of factors, including lack of experience, technical competency and capacity among the CAR Secretariat staff to undertake the required role as effective convenors of a change process. At the same time Project Implementation Units are not a universal panacea and should be carefully reviewed vis--vis capacity constrains and (exit) strategies to allow proper institutionalization of reforms. LESSON LEARNED #4: PAR and decentralization must be organised to reinforce each other. Another key lesson learned, which will also be discussed in the next section, is the need for a comprehensive integration of the support to public administrative reforms and the support to decentralisation in order not, unintentionally, to institutionalise a separation which might not capture the complexity of public administrative and civil service reform and unintentionally reinforce existing political divisions within government. This is also a lesson learned on the shortcomings of the general development approach used by some donors, including UNDP, which in the past has tended to centre on discrete projects delineated from each other, as opposed to the inherently political and complex areas such as public administrative and civil service reform. In sum, despite its shortcomings, the PAR programme has been supportive in developing the capacity of the CAR Secretariat to better direct and coordinate the implementation of the NPAR. Furthermore, a potential key result with possible wider interest elsewhere has been the development of the PMG concept. While the PMG approach has yet to be operationalized and trialed by the government, it holds the potential, if sufficiently supported and managed by government, for addressing the distortions created by varying donor practices on salary supplements, through establishing a government supported norm for the level of salary allowances while at the same time linking it to performance. Likewise, the PMG programme needs to be incorporated into a civil service salary reform programme comprehensively addressing the acute issue of remuneration as it will otherwise remain a limited stop gap measure and management tool. It cannot replace a comprehensive civil service salary reform aiming at lifting average salaries to competitive levels with the private sector. In anticipation of the operationalization of the PMG approach, UNDP is developing a project to establish a PMG funds management mechanism to advocate the approach among donors and mobilize additional resources. However, only if the majority of the development partners join the PMG approach will its potential be fully realised. 6. Recommendations for the future (3 pages max). A number of strategic considerations have and will continue to influence the shape of UNDPs activities in the area of governance in Cambodia. With the substantial completion of Phase I under the NPAR and the current SRF coming to its end, key development partners (IMF, World Bank, DFID)

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being in the process of reviewing their programmes with Cambodia, the UN Country Team about to update their Common Country Assessment, recent communal elections completed, a new government being formed following national elections and the second Cambodian MDG report being finalized, UNDP is in the process of reviewing its PAR portfolio. Several considerations are guiding the explorations: The generic nature of UNDP's support programme to PAR has allowed the Government to flexibly use UNDP's assistance to tackle priority areas, and UNDPs visibility is so high that it is co-chairing the PAR Working Group. However, it seems timely to move on as UNDPs definitional role in PAR is about to change in favour of other stakeholders as the PAR agenda increasingly turn towards comprehensive civil service salary reform. In this area, it is important to admit that UNDP's leadership will gradually be under heavy competition as players such as the World Bank are already investing means that UNDP can ill afford. The complexity of the issues requires capacities and leverages that UNDP does not possess and the current status of reforms demonstrate that UNDP can no longer be a catalytic player in the soon to come mammoth task of public administration reform. Furthermore, the dual focus on PAR and decentralization separately, which is perhaps unintentionally being institutionalized in Cambodia, warrants a critical review emphasizing decentralization as part of the broader reform of the State, and complementary to the reform of the public administration system aiming at creating an efficient, transparent, accountable and responsive public sector at all levels. Particularly, one component of PAR which is closely interlinked with decentralization reform is deconcentration the transfer of decision making authority and responsibility from central ministries to their sub-national offices at provincial and district levels. As international experience shows, the effectiveness and the benefits of decentralization depends on the effectiveness by which services are delivered through deconcentrated agencies. Decentralization disperses power, geographically and institutionally. Accordingly, it requires a redefinition of the role of each tier of government. When service delivery functions and structures are decentralized, existing bureaucratic patterns and structures must also be reorganized as roles and functions are shifted. Today, the main frontline in pushing ahead with public administrative reforms in Cambodia apart from civil service salary reform remains the integration of ongoing decentralization and deconcentration and extension of public service delivery. UNDPs support to PAR and decentralization needs to be designed in a coherent manner in terms, for instance, of their sequencing and interrelationships to ensure complementarity. Drawing on UNDPs experience based on its support to PAR and SEILA, potential areas for future support include: strategic management support to the Government for managing the implementation of the overall reform process; advocacy of a comprehensive incentives policy that respect capacity development principles; reinforcing support on judicial and legislative branches of Government to enhance accountability, transparency and participation; investing on service delivery targeting via its support to the PRSP, MDGs monitoring and reporting, National HDR and aid coordination; and pro-poor support for the government at the highest level in its negotiations with other powerful partners.

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Also, after 10 years of reform, formal democratic institutions are largely in place in Cambodia. However, democratic governance as defined by UNDP transcends the state and comprises a variety of mechanisms and processes, through which citizens and groups can articulate their interests, exercise their rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences. To create a vibrant democratic society in Cambodia the next governance frontier in the country is to fill the gap between a largely top down reform process and a bottom up demand management. With current structures to fill the gap between the two being weak and the authority of a strong State and highly centralized parties still being perceived as overwhelming, UNDP as a trusted partner of government and civil society has an important role to play in this area. This can be done by facilitating citizens participation and civil society through the creation of voice mechanisms that provide avenues for enhancing broad-based local participation in the articulation of local needs, the engagement of civil society in the policy formulation process, as well as the mobilization of support for reform and the monitoring of policy implementation. To this end and building on the pioneering work UNDP has done on leadership for transformation and process consultation related to HIV/AIDS, the CO is considering using support to improvement of public service delivery as one possible entry point for enhancing civic engagement, building leadership and constituencies for reforms within and outside the government. It should encompass not only change champions and key decision-makers in the Royal Government of Cambodia but also elected officials, civic leaders and political party structures. In order to inform the process of reinventing UNDPs approach to NPAR and designing UNDPs support to the next stage of governance reforms in Cambodia, several interventions are tentatively planned. The planned approach is building on the successful example of SEILA, where piloting successful concepts, demonstration of effective tools and application of best practices in decentralized planning and management mechanisms for local development have led to the institutionalization of nation-wide policies and structures for decentralization. In this respect, the pilot approach being explored is intended to guide the identification and selection of suitable services for a longer-term programme aimed at improving public service delivery in priority sectors and inform policy making on deconcentration. However, great care needs to be exhibited in ensuring that such pilots contribute to a coherent policy development, which can guide further improvements across all ministries. Signs of fragmentation in the national public administrative reform programme are starting to appear as more and more donors get involved in pilots to inform policy development. Unintended side effects, such as the creation of vested interests in specific sectors and/or approaches need to be countered to ensure consistency and coherence. In sum, UNDP continues to have important roles to play within the existing areas identified for UNDP support to PAR. UNDPs niche is in the area of supporting strategic activities to help promote ownership of reform and providing comparative examples for strategic policy and reform choices. A key challenge for UNDP in governance generally, and public administrative and civil service reform specifically will be to bring the critical linkages and relationships between the main institutional structures of Government

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(legislative, executive and judiciary) together in a coherent and mutually reinforcing approach via its activities. In this respect, UNDP should do more of what it already does well and reconsider its involvement in areas where focus and expertise is lacking.

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