In “Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in the Developing States,” the author, Professor Erin Metz McDonnell outlines three lessons that can be learnt or incorporated into managing effective civil/public institutions’ bureaucracies.

Prof McDonnell identified these lessons – small group culture, ‘slack’ and small wins, and management style – through research conducted in Ghana. The book was launched on the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) platform in Accra on Wednesday, 27th July 2022.

She said most often international organisations or individuals when measuring institutional performances in developing countries, give a macro representation of issues without digging deep to ascertain the various pockets of successes within the gloomy picture being painted.

Per her analysis, intergovernmental organisations are quick to peg white capitalists’ ideology of organisational operation against African states’ ways of managing their affairs, meanwhile, they have different settings and circumstances.

She argues that regardless of how much individuals in developing countries are fighting to improve their systems at personal levels, the storyline of African organisations had remained bribery, complex bureaucracies and long queues for accessing basic services.

“Hearing the negative does not actually tell us how to do it well. Weak states like Ghana contain within them highly effective niches acting completely in the public interest. There are places that are working well and providing quality services to Ghanaians,” she noted.   

The Sociology professor while understudying four institutions in Ghana – Ministry of Finance, the Commercial High Court, Bank of Ghana (BoG), and the National Communication Authority (NCA) – for a one and half-year period (2007-2008), identified persons in these institutions who are working positively to influence others behaviours within the same working environment.

She said those small group cultures are those individuals who are concentrated in one unit or department and are working tirelessly to get things done. And also, while members of the group can be moved around the institution for a snowball effect, she advised that those decisions require great caution, in order to not to occasion a relapse of negative behaviour, stress the individual or create a vacuum.

Prof McDonnell added that although it is irrational to work in an environment without resources, managed style counts in every length and breadth of institutional success. In what she described as managing generously with accountability, placing a responsibility on the institutional head to model behaviours, extend opportunities, enable real decision power, encourage ideas, feedback, recognition, acknowledge and reward for befitting staff.

According to her, it takes a refined leader to teach his or her subordinates how to say no to bribes without offending the giver.

The book was reviewed by Prof Frank Ohemeng, Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Concordia University,  Prof Nana Akua Anyidoho, Director for Social Policy, University of Ghana, and Dr Emmanuel Ayisi, lecturer at the Department of Public Administration and Health Services Management, University of Ghana.  

One of the major issues raised by Prof Ohemeng was that the book failed to connect institutional effectiveness to efficiency.