The Twenty-First-Century Public Servant: A Developing Country Perspective

Abstract

Governments all over the world are facing enormous challenges – from austerity to changing demographics, climate change, and the digital deluge, among others (Hutt, What are the 10 biggest global challenges?. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/what-are-the-10-biggest-global-challenges/, 2016; Van der Wal, The 21st century public manager. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2017). Developing countries rarely feature in conversations on the challenges that the future poses for public service, despite the fact that they are especially vulnerable to “wicked” policy problems (Rittel and Webber Policy Sciences 4:155–169, 1973) due to capability constraints in the form of subpar economic performance, scarce resources, weak or compromised institutions, and political turbulence (Pattanaik, Issues and challenges of development: an introduction. Sage, 2017). These both limit and define the type of skills that public servants in less developed contexts need, for the governments to thrive in the current realities and deliver quality public services to the citizens. The three main pressures of changing citizenry, complexity, and technology require public servants in developing countries to foster a number of skills and roles: collaborator, empathizer, resource manager, political navigator, tech literate, and knowledge broker. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which governments in developing countries can facilitate the attainment and improvement of these skills in public servants. The key message for developing countries is to tailor human resource management practices – including recruitment, pay, training, and job design – to the specific circumstances and pre-existing conditions in which they operate, rather than import ready-made solutions, generated outside of the local context.