Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries

Schneider, Ben Ross and Blanca Heredia (eds.) Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries. Miami, FL: North-South Press at University of Miami, 2003. 319 pp.

Confounding! As an organizational theorist with a half-century interest in development at home and abroad, this was my first reading of the book under review.

The book was narrowly conceived and disregarded a rich scholarship on change and development. A crude question arose in my confoundings: Where do these guys come from? Turning to the brief bio-sketches, there seem to be six U.S. Americans and seven Latin Americans. Several of the Latin Americans held advanced degrees from reputable U.S. universities. Seven had graduate degrees in political science/politics, three in economics, one in sociology, one in public administration and one in architecture. By name 1 counted two women, Blanca Heredia, co-editor from Mexico, and Barbara Nunberg, contributor, from the USA. I gained the impression that the editors and their contributors were aggressive young scholars with international experience. The subject matter of the book concerned politics of administrative reform in selected Latin American countries with two excursions into Thailand and Hungary. The intellectual aim, as indicated in the title, was reinventing the leviathan. Here I was confounded by inorganic and organic considerations. For me reinventing seems mechanistic, repairing a machine, and leviathan, healing a big fish. The editors obviously drew upon John Locke for this title, but little Lockean philosophy appeared.

In seeking clarity I came to the realization that these thirteen writers were Harry Potter contemporaries. They were profoundly influenced by the goings-on in the Wizard Kingdom of 1990's Washington, D.C. Their principle school of wizardry was the Bank of Reconstruction and Development, known as the World Bank, which had decided that governmental reform was basic to constructive national growth and development. The magical potion for reform would be application of neo-liberal economics.

The new scripture of wizardry was the work by journalist David Osborne and city manager Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (1992). Its subtitle is "How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public sector from Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon." The subtitle of a companion work, Banishing Bureaucracy ( 1997), written by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, is even more "how to," "The Five Strategies for Reinvent ing Government." In both works entrepreneurship reigns supreme. The game of administrative reform, the task of reinvention, is about replacing bureaucratic systems (bad) with entrepreneurial systems (good).

In this game of wizardry, there is little need to define key concepts and terms such as reform, society, public, government, state, administration. A new state order is instituted by carving out and rejecting old fashioned "stuff and incorporating into the progressive entity the capacity for organizational maximization of output/performance. The result is the triumph of technocrats. Hence, nearly all of the references are of this appropriate 1990's variety. The economic notion of opportunity costs is taken seriously, making way to get the highest rates of return on investments. Authoritarian economic rationale takes precedence over the ideal of democratic governance.

Of course, bankers and financiers would embrace such a state of affairs-real corporatism, which, incidentally, characterized Indonesia's Suharto's developmentalism.

The wizardry of reinvention captured the imagination of both U.S. and foreign scholars with a lot of new jargon emerging such as new public management and new managerialism. This intellectual faddism was, indeed, pervasive. However, at the time of this writing, serious scholars are questioningn reinvention/entrepreneurial wizardry. "Entrepreneuring" can lead to endemic corruption, jeopardizing a democracy's polity, and pursuing wrong social goals. In other words, the market becomes the paramount socioeconomic evil.1

Pursuing the common good can only be accomplished by a government based upon responsible citizenship and a competent civil service. There are limits to what the market may accomplish. Markets fail. Basic care functions such as maintaining law and order and administering justice can never be privatized. A substantial measure of government regulation is necessary to ensure a healthy market; making certain, for example, that weights and measure are maintained.

Schneider and Heredia, the two editors, approached their wizardry in a straightforward manner, with no serious reservations. Leviathans are no doubt tough creatures, but they can be reinvented. Although not identified as such, the process was accelerated Darwinian evolution caused by introduced entrepreneurialism. Liberal economics is a powerful lubrication.

So goes the essence of the beginning of this book under review, as expressed in the preface and acknowledgments and the introduction in form of Chapter 1, "The Political Economy of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries." They justify their endeavor by first noting: "Administrative reform had surprisingly little to say about politics" and second "A series of recently public studies on the politics. . .of reforms (have) generated.. . plausible hypotheses . . . ." Preface and Acknowledgments, p. i. From these two notings, the editors move on to the Osborne and Goebler rationale in reinventing government. They rely heavily upon the World Bank's flagship publication, the 1997 World Development Report: The State in a Changing World, p. 1. The notion of two reform waves is utilized. The first downsized government and the second focused on "building or rebuilding institutional and administrative capacities."(p. 1) Demoralized civil service was often a consequence of the first wave.