Politico-Administrative Culture and Public Service Reform in Post-Independence Kazakhstan

Abstract

Classical organizational management literature draws clear parallels between organizational culture and climate and effective use of power and influence as key to successful policy implementation of reforms in public sector organizations. On the other hand, the public policy literature, in particular, policy transfer as a strand within policy studies, emphasizes the role of the national context, more specifically, ‘facilitators’ and ‘constraints’ of ‘‘politico-administrative culture” within the national context, as crucial to understanding processes of transfer, convergence, and diffusion of public policy. There is a plethora of studies by Western scholars of public management who have successfully utilized these theoretical underpinnings to study the effectiveness of public service reforms in mature policy environments such as the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and others. However, the public policy and comparative public management literature only offers a limited number of case studies from developing, middle-/upper-middle countries, which rely on concepts of organizational management in addition to narratives on the impact of policy learning from global doctrines, such as Weberianism, New Public Management (NPM), and New Public Governance (NPG), and national politics, on the implementation of administrative reforms in those contexts. Kazakhstan, as a resource-affluent post-Soviet country and a bastion of modernization and ‘open government’ in Central Asia or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the post-Soviet era is a case in point. Based on ethnographic research consisting of interviews with elite academics, civil servants, and think-tank activists, as well as reviews of OECD and government strategy reports in Astana, the findings point to a potential abatement of the impact of context constraints such as large power distance and collectivist behavior by context facilitators such as those surrounding the use of ‘trilingualism’ and public diplomacy towards reforms in Kazakhstan particularly in recent years.