Conflict, Legitimacy and Government Reform: Equitable Allocation of ...

98 KPI Congress XI
Creating a merit based civil service to prevent nepotism and
enhance performance: For example, in Singapore the
government has consciously followed a stringent policy to
cultivate and nurture the civil service, to ensure that it has the
best talents to drive the country forward. Factors that have
contributed to this amazing story include: the government
follows a businesslike approach within the civil service,
continuously analyzing the service delivery needs of the country
and the emerging global trends, reforming the civil service
according to such needs and trends, and utilizing the knowledge
available from the vast business and educational sector and
industries that are present in the country; the government has
continuously played a very active role in identifying, nurturing
and grooming promising young talents for civil service leadership
positions, including providing scholarships for local and foreign
universities, and continuing development programmes; public
servants in Singapore receive very competitive salaries, rivaling
even the private sector; in addition to providing a relatively high
salary structure for the civil service, the government has exhibited
strong political will to combat corruption. 10
Enhancing service quality to put citizens first – citizen’s
charters: In the UK the Charter programme was one of the
clearest articulations of the need to focus on the experience of
public service users, and for services to be responsive to the
people using them. It also popularised the ideas that performance
should be measured and measurements made public, and that
information about services should be readily available in plain
language. The Public Service Committee concluded in its 1997
report that The Citizens’ Charter had made “a valuable
contribution to improving public ser vices”. It led to
10 Robert, Bernando. The Role of Incentives in Civil Service Reform: the Singapore
Story, http://regionalcentrebangkok.undp.or.th/practices/capacitydevelopment/
documents Evidence_from_the_field_series_Singapore_Civil_Service_Reform_through_
Incentives_-_formated.pdf.