Doctoral Researchers

Success and failure of civil service reform in Afghanistan

“Public employment [in Afghanistan] is now purchased rather than earned… the main problem is that before reforms family, party and faction connections were privileged… and now the whole system is dominated by money"
(USAID-Afghanistan, 2009)

"The world knows that we did our best and it worked well! Thanks to Taliban we had no single policy paper when we got the office, but now you have clear instruction and policy about every aspect of Afghan civil Service”
(Former IARCSC Commissioner, 2012)

How and under what conditions were Civil Service Reforms (CSR) in the post-Taliban era of Afghanistan initiated? Why were reforms in few line ministries reportedly implemented successfully whereas the same reforms with the same implementation structure and under the similar leadership style have failed in some others? Who were the main domestic and foreign actors involved in the process? What was their role and interest? And finally, while reforming Afghanistan's civil service, to which extent were the lessons learnt from previous large scale SCR initiatives in other post-conflict societies considered and what could be the main learnings from more than one decade of reforms in Afghanistan? In the light of these, and similar, fundamental questions, this research aims to study the costly, time consuming and wicked process of reforming civil service in the context of Afghanistan, where a variety of factors such as involvement of several domestic and foreign actors with conflicting interests, large scale ongoing corruption within the public sector- due to injection of billions of international aid- and finally lack of capacity, networks of patronage and institutionalized nepotism have created a very complex, and in some cases unique, environment for any kind of reform to succeed.

Concentrating on three main areas being recruitment, pay and grade, and promotion of civil servants, the study will first analyze the processes, actors involved and their approaches during rule formulation and policy making of major reforms, since their start in 2003, and then through an exploratory perspective it will research the implementation of those reforms across two or more ministries as the most successful and most failed implementations to address the controversial views on consequences, outcomes and the sustainability of implemented reforms.