Civil service reform in Kazakhstan: trajectory to the 30 most developed countries?

Abstract

Kazakhstan has ambitious plans to become one of the top 30 developed countries in the world by 2050. Its most recent route map to achieve this is the Plan for the Nation: 100 Concrete Steps, announced by the president in May 2015. A key pillar in this reform agenda is the development of a professional civil service. This article considers whether civil service reforms to date and those envisaged under the new plan offer a trajectory to the 2050 stated goal. It finds that despite significant political endorsement at the highest level, reforms have focused on institutional, structural and legal changes without the necessary attention to how these will impact on the quality of public services provision. The article highlights the interdependence between civil service reforms and an outcomes-based approach and adapts the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life framework for Kazakhstan as a way of making this connection.

Points for practitioners

Moving to an outcomes-based approach in a developing country challenges practitioners to focus on the impact of their work and to be judicious and context-specific in the selection of results indicators.

Keywords

civil service reforms Kazakhstan outcomes-based accountability

Background

In December 2016, Kazakhstan celebrated 25 years of its independence following the break-up of the Soviet Union. During this period, it has undergone a major political, economic and social transformation. Kazakhstan is characterized by a number of factors: its post-Soviet legacy; its large geographical territory (ninth largest country in the world); its low density of population; its access to rich natural reserves; its multi-ethnic composition (over 100 nationalities); and its transformation from a planned to a market-based economy within a relatively short period of time. As a result of its access to oil and gas resources, Kazakhstan is now classified by the World Bank (2015) as an ‘upper middle-income country’.

Kazakhstan has high political ambitions, including the declared aim of joining the top 30 developed countries in the world by 2050. Soon after the president’s re-election in 2015, and as a direct response to worsening regional and global economic conditions, he launched the Plan for the Nation in May 2015, with the intention of accelerating the modernization agenda (Nazarbayev, 2015). One, of five, key pillars of reform is the creation of a modern and professional civil service that eschews nepotism, protectionism and corruption. Therein, the president promoted the idea of a new civil service model that will create a more effective and professional public service. Consistent with this new model is the principle of meritocracy, regardless of ethnic background, and payment by results. All of this suggests a radical plan for the civil service and, more widely, a programme of public sector reform.

If Kazakhstan is to become one of the top 30 developed countries in the world, the research question posed in this article is whether the existing and planned civil service reforms, contained in Strategy 2050 and the Plan for the Nation, offer a trajectory for this ambitious change to happen. We attempt to address this question through a critical analysis of the substance of the reform agenda and examine whether there is interconnectedness between structural changes in the civil service and the potential for these reforms to improve the quality of public services in the daily lives of Kazakhstani citizens. The article is structured in three parts. First, we consider existing research on civil service reforms in developing countries, with specific reference to Kazakhstan. Second, we examine the practical outworking of the reforms in Kazakhstan and their impact to date. Finally, we suggest an outcomes-based public services framework as a way of connecting civil service reforms to the improved well-being of the citizens of Kazakhstan.

Civil service reform

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conducted a multi-donor evaluation of public sector governance reviews in developing countries between 2001 and 2011 and found a ‘broadly negative picture’ in terms of the impact of reforms (Scott, 2011; see also Manning, 2001; Polidano, 2001; Pollitt, 2013). Drawing on the work of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (2009), the review noted ‘that civil service administration reform efforts have not been successful’ (Evans, 2008: iii). The review described three waves of civil service reform, as follows. The first wave (during the 1980s) involved reducing the size of the civil service and restructuring central organizations. The second wave (beginning in the 1990s) was significantly influenced by public management reforms and included performance assessment, greater transparency and decentralization. The evidence, the review concluded, was that these reforms ‘have largely been regarded as failures’ (Scott, 2011: 14). The current phase focuses more on improving the quality and motivation of the civil service, better recruitment and promotion systems, and ultimately improving services delivery. Additionally, Scott (2011: 14) argued, ‘there is an increased results focus as most post-2000 civil service reforms have been linked to quality service delivery to support long term growth and poverty reduction’.

While Kazakhstan has embraced elements of public management reforms, commentators have indicated a need to ‘transform fundamentally what it means to be a civil servant and the way goods are exchanged between public officials and citizens’ (Starr et al., 2016: 54). This, they argued, means going beyond international best practice and reforming from within public bodies: ‘As long as there is no incentive for public officials to approach their work in a new manner, business as usual will prevail’ (Starr et al., 2016: 54). Turning to the specific circumstances of Kazakhstan, there is an emerging body of scholarship on civil service reform as a key component of the wider public sector change agenda. By far the most comprehensive research is the work of Emrich-Bakenova (2009). She examined three stages of civil service development in Kazakhstan and assessed the extent to which it was free from political influence, particularly on issues of selection, remuneration and promotion. Emrich-Bakenova (2009: 739) concluded that the development of civil service law was aimed at fostering a merit-based, professional and stable civil service; however, ‘each step forward has also had a counterbalancing element undermining the very same objectives of merit, professionalism and stability’.

Bhuiyan and Amagoh (2011) categorize public sector reforms in Kazakhstan as falling into four key areas: the decentralization of responsibilities; civil service reforms; e-governance; and the role of civil society (Knox and Yessimova, 2015). These reform efforts have ‘helped Kazakhstan facilitate its economic development and enhance the possibility for it to attain its goal of being one of the top 50 competitive economies in the world’ but they are ‘a first step in helping the country towards the part of being a competitive player on the global stage’ (Bhuiyan and Amagoh, 2011: 243, emphasis added).

More recently, in a review of administrative reforms since Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, Oleinik, Yermekov and Kuatbekov (2015) argue that despite three phases of public management-type changes, these have not led to significant changes in the quality of governance. Their analysis uses the concept of power distance between superiors and subordinates (power elite and sub-elites) and they argue that relatively low power distance is more amenable to public management reforms and high power distance to Weberian-type changes. They find that a high power distance exists and, as a consequence, this ‘determines the scope of administrative reforms’ (Oleinik et al., 2015: 187). These findings are consistent with the work of Monobayeva and Howard (2015: 150), who, using a case study of the implementation of the Bologna process in higher education in Kazakhstan, found that remnants of Soviet administrative practices are still evident, ‘including strong control by educational ministries, as well as incompatible organizational cultures and a tendency toward superficial formalism in the implementation process’.

We argue in this article that civil service reforms represent an example of institutional isomorphism or imitation, where Kazakhstan has simply adopted structural changes as part of the wider (global) public management reform agenda for developing countries (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). In so doing, this has led to ‘empty mimicry’, which decouples civil service form from functions. This leads to a situation where countries ‘adopt the visible trappings of reforms … without actually implementing them to achieve their intended functions’ (Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff, 2015: 224, citing Krause, 2013). Simply, Kazakhstan sees civil service restructuring as part of the global menu of public management reforms, with an emphasis on form, but, in so doing, has decoupled the core functions of the civil service, namely, to provide high-quality public services to its citizens, potentially an exercise in empty mimicry. Reforming the civil service is a cornerstone of Kazakhstan’s strategic plans going forward, connecting these reforms to better public services is the missing link. As Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff (2015) argue, isomorphic mimicry and institutional decoupling is particularly evident where external bodies advocate public sector reforms (specifically in the case of Kazakhstan, the OECD, World Bank and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)). We now consider the practical outworking of the civil service reforms that have taken place in Kazakhstan given their significance in the Plan for the Nation going forward.

Civil service reforms in Kazakhstan

Practical reforms to the public sector in Kazakhstan can be divided into four stages. During the first stage from 1991 to 1998, Kazakhstan’s public administration remained essentially Soviet (Emrich-Bakenova, 2009: 721) despite early attempts in 1995 by the government to establish a civil service system based on meritocratic principles (Baimenov, 2000). The second stage occurred during the period 1999–2004, when efforts were directed towards the design and establishment of a proper functioning civil service system with a strong legislative basis. During this period, public administration reform became a top priority for the Kazakhstan government. Reforms attempted to achieve greater transparency and responsiveness in the state apparatus through the downsizing and reorganization of a number of state bodies. The third phase, 2005–2015, saw a renewed focus on modernization (Knox, 2008) aimed at improving the quality of public services and reducing the level of corruption, enacted through one-stop shops (public service centres) and e-government policies. Both these initiatives had a significant impact on the transformation of government–citizen relations and making the government more effective and transparent in delivering public services (Janenova and Kim, 2016). Since 2015, the fourth phase, there is a new emphasis on the professionalization of civil service personnel, further improving government–citizen relations and enhancing public accountability. Hence, the first institutional reform pillar in the 2015 Plan for the Nation is the creation of a modern and professional civil service. In less than six months, the government introduced several new legislative Acts in 2015 to achieve this goal: Law on Civil Service, Law on Fighting Corruption and the Code of Ethics for Civil Servants.

However, building a meritocratic civil service challenges the established political order in Kazakhstan. Isaacs (2013), for example, argued that Nur Otan, the political party of the president, consolidated its position in power through networks of government and public officials within the state’s apparatus. Under the constitution, state representatives can also be members of political parties. This, Isaacs (2013: 1072) argued, ‘created a relationship of dependency between state employees and the party … the political party has become synonymous with civil servants and bureaucracy’. This close alignment between state officials and Nur Otan is further consolidated through a high degree of centralization in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Akims, as the heads of regions (Oblasts) in Kazakhstan, have limited discretion when taking decisions about their areas. As Junisbai (2010: 255) noted: ‘the Akim is not so much the representative of a particular Oblast … as he [sic] is the President’s delegate charged with the implementation of executive decisions handed down to him’.

Old habits of nepotism and tribal connections die hard but there are signs of change, not least in the long reach of the president’s political party into the workings of the executive. So, although Nur Otan, because of its networking among the state elites, is an important player for those looking for a technocratic career, Peyrouse (2012: 370) contends that ‘the products of the Nazarbayev regime, the new middle classes of civil servants and private actors, tend to be increasingly demanding public accountability and good governance mechanisms from inside the system’. All of this makes civil service reform an important tool in the quest for Kazakhstan to become one of the 30 most developed countries by 2050.

The consistent observation throughout the whole period of civil service reform has been the strong political support from the president evident from 1999 onwards, running alongside several reorganizational changes in the reforming bodies involved. The Civil Service Agency experienced three reorganizations during 2014–2016, being recently reorganized into the Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Anti-Corruption. Structural reviews and reorganizations feature writ large in Kazakhstan.

Impact of the reforms

What is the assessment of the civil service and wider public sector reform agenda to date and will they set Kazakhstan on a trajectory towards becoming one of the top 30 developed countries by 2050, its intended target? The evidence so far points to mixed success on some of the wider public sector reform initiatives. Reforms on anti-corruption, public service modernization and e-government, for example, were launched simultaneously and are seen as interdependent ways to improve public services and the interface between citizens and public officials. The e-government policy is acknowledged as having been successful. According to the United Nations’ (UN’s) 2016 E-Government Development Index, Kazakhstan is ranked 33rd overall out of 193 countries, and first in Central Asia. Public service centres proved to be successful in reducing bureaucracy and paperwork through enabling access by citizens to over 500 public services at one physical location (Janenova, 2017).

On the other hand, the success of efforts in tackling corruption is less sanguine. The Kazakhstan government has long recognized the challenge of corruption and adopted several anti-corruption programmes since 2001. Despite the introduction of laws to fight corruption and associated anti-corruption measures, protectionism, nepotism and cronyism are still flourishing in Kazakhstan. In 2016, for example, Kazakhstan scored only 29 out of 100 points on the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International, ranking 131 among 176 countries (Transparency International, 2017).

Have civil service reforms been impactful? One source of evidence is the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs) on government effectiveness. These measures capture perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies (Kaufmann et al., 2010). Figure 1 uses the worldwide data on government effectiveness to compare performance on this measure across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Kazakhstan is ranked the second best-performing country after Georgia. The scale of measurement is from 0 to 100 (with 0 = lowest rank and 100 = highest rank).

Figure 1.

Government effectiveness in CIS countries.

The WGIs also show the change in government effectiveness over time for Kazakhstan since 2004 over a 10-year period: from 27.8 in 2004 to 54.33 in 2014. So, relative to other CIS countries, government effectiveness is good and progressing over time. Some of this progress may be attributed to the nature of the reforms in the civil service, although a direct causal link is difficult to establish. The problem is that if Kazakhstan is intent on becoming one of the 30 most developed countries in the world, then these are the wrong benchmarks. Instead, Kazakhstan needs to be ‘competing’ against countries that feature in the top 30 rankings. If, for example, we consider the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) as one way of benchmarking Kazakhstan against other developed/developing countries, then we should realistically consider government effectiveness measures for those countries ranked from, say, 25 to 30 in the HDI: Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Greece and Estonia, respectively, as listed in the HDI rankings for 2014. Currently, Kazakhstan is ranked 56th in the HDI and has ambitions to move to ≥ 30. We include this comparison in Figure 2. So, Kazakhstan has some way to go if, on this single indicator of government effectiveness, it is to join the top 30 developed countries.

Figure 2.

Government effectiveness of HDI-ranked countries.

Civil service reforms and results-oriented state governance system

To effect the type of changes needed to lift Kazakhstan’s performance on ‘government effectiveness’ demands attention to the quality of public services that the modernized civil service provides. This is the absent link in the reforms agenda. So, even though two (of the five) key pillars in the Plan for the Nation are civil service reform and the creation of a results-oriented state governance system, they are disconnected in the outworking of the plan and lack detail as to how they might be achieved. Reforming the civil service must be seen as a means to achieve an outcomes-based approach that promises better public services for the people of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan already has some experience in developing an outcomes-oriented approach through its strategic planning process. The country is replete with strategies, plans and public statements outlined by the president as a route map to the 30 most developed countries. Strategy 2050 was launched in 2012 as an ambitious plan of economic, social and political reforms to be implemented in two stages: a programme of modernization up until 2030, followed by sustainable development until 2050. This strategy was followed by Nurly Zhol (Bright Path) (launched in 2014), aimed at driving state and foreign investment, and then Nurly Zher Strategy 2025 (launched in 2016), a plan to significantly grow housing infrastructure. In 2015, the president outlined his 100 Concrete Steps, Plan for the Nation (referenced in this paper) and, most recently, the Third Modernisation Strategy (2017) to drive, inter alia, technological modernization, macroeconomic stability and institutional reforms.

While these strategies are aimed at creating a momentum towards Kazakhstan’s ultimate development goal of reaching the top 30 countries, they highlight three important issues. First, much of the wording in these strategy documents is aspirational and difficult for officials to operationalize. One example from Strategy 2050 includes a commitment to ‘create a professional state apparatus, for which service to the people and State is paramount’ (https://strategy2050.kz/en/: page 2). Without detailed operational plans, this strategic goal, while well intentioned, may amount to little in practice. Second, there is a key problem of policy implementation in Kazakhstan, not least because of its complex system of public administration. There are: 15 government ministries and one central executive body (the Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Anti-Corruption); 6269 state enterprises that operate in sectors where the direct provision of a public service is deemed necessary; 679 joint stock companies and limited liability partnerships established by the government and the National Bank to engage in the production of market goods and services in a competitive environment; and 18,902 state institutions that are non-commercial entities created by the president, the government or local executive bodies for carrying out sociocultural or administrative functions (OECD, 2017). With such a complex system of governance comes the likelihood of poor horizontal and vertical coordination, as well as duplication across executive bodies. Third, the frequency of strategies, plans, presidential orders and decrees has led to initiative overload and hence no opportunity for evaluation and reflection on policies that were effective or failed. As a recent review of governance in Kazakhstan noted:

More generally, the strategic plans could further provide ministries a stronger framework to evaluate the effects of their policies.… For this, the government would benefit from developing guidelines for integrating strategic planning, performance evaluation and risk management on the basis of a unified logical account of the linkages among policy outputs, outcomes and impact. (OECD, 2017: 12)

Given the limited success to date with outcomes-based accountability through strategic planning, how might outcomes-based accountability be used to provide better public services and, as a result, an improvement in the quality of life for the citizens of Kazakhstan?

One approach that offers potential here is the OECD’s Better Life Initiative, launched in 2011, which aims to measure people’s well-being across OECD countries. The OECD framework breaks down well-being into two elements: current well-being, measured by material living conditions and quality of life; and future well-being, measured through economic, natural, human and social capital (see Figure 3). The OECD highlights four important features of the model: it focuses on people, their situation and how they relate to others in the community; it concentrates on well-being outcomes as opposed to inputs or outputs; it considers distribution of outcomes to address disparities (across age, gender, socio-economic backgrounds); and it looks at both objective and subjective measures of well-being. Importantly, the OECD emphasizes that the framework ‘has been conceived as a tool rather than a straitjacket, and that it can be adjusted to reflect societal preferences that may vary across countries and groups’ (Boarini et al., 2014: 17).

Figure 3.

OECD well-being framework. Note: GDP = gross domestic product.

Adapting this framework as the basis for moving towards a results-oriented society referenced in Kazakhstan’s Plan for the Nation presents a number of problems: indicators that constitute quality of life in OECD countries will be quite different from those in developing countries (e.g. drinking water and sanitation are unlikely to feature in the former); access to reliable and valid data sources to populate an adapted well-being framework for a country like Kazakhstan are problematic; and the ‘whole of government’ approach needed to embed well-being as a concept aimed at moving towards ‘a results-oriented state governance system’ demands a shift in vertical (silo) government towards horizontal (cross-cutting) collaboration between ministries/departments. What is proposed in this article is therefore a first tentative step towards adapting the OECD framework in Kazakhstan, including the fact that the baseline indicators that populate the model are driven, in part, by access to data. If the concept of outcomes-based accountability as interdependent with civil service reform becomes accepted, then the indicators could be refined and robust data collected to better capture well-being in Kazakhstan. The proposed outcome indicators developed by the authors are set out in Table 1 in Appendix 1.

Connecting civil service reforms to well-being

We tested the reaction to these indicators (see Table 1 in Appendix 1) using five focus groups of participants from several government bodies, quasi-government agencies and business organizations. Participants (n = 52 in total) represented mid-ranking managers and officials from:

Central-level government bodies in Kazakhstan (including Presidential Administration, Ministry of Defense, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Investment and Development, Ministry of National Economy, Ministry of Energy, Ministry of Finance, Agency for Civil Service and Anti-Corruption, Supreme Court, and Ministry of Religion and Civil Society).

Quasi-government and government-related organizations (republican state entity ‘Central-Communications Service’, republican state enterprise ‘National Centre of Expertise’, National Bank, National Agency for Technological Development, national company ‘KazMunayGas’, national company ‘Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary’, national company ‘Kazakhstan Engineering’, joint stock company ‘Astana Financial Centre’, joint stock company ‘Kazatomprom’).

Business companies (‘Ernst & Young Kazakhstan’, ‘Tengizshevroil’, commercial bank ‘Tsesna Bank’, Kazakhstan Project Management Association, and a local agricultural company).

The focus groups were conducted in Astana during September–November 2016 in both the Russian and English languages. Convenience sampling was used to carefully recruit participants, ensuring the representation of a range of opinions from government, quasi-government and business sectors. The level of participants varied from early career recruits to those with significant experience, and there was gender parity in the composition of the groups. The authors moderated the focus groups and took extensive notes (rather than recording). Anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed to the participants in order to ensure openness and the protection of their identity lest their views had adverse career implications.

Discussions with each group were conducted in two rounds. In the first round, three open-ended questions were asked to encourage group discussion on civil service reform from different perspectives:

What have been the most important reforms in the civil service over the past 10 years and why?

The Plan for the Nation recommended a number of changes aimed at developing a professional civil service. What has been their impact?

What are the obstacles to change in creating a ‘professional civil service’?

The second round began with a brief presentation of the OECD well-being framework and outcome indicators suggested specifically for Kazakhstan. Two additional open-ended questions were addressed to the participants to reflect on these indicators individually, discuss in small groups and report back to the moderators:

What are your reactions to the outcomes (results-oriented) state governance system that we propose (strand 5 of Plan for the Nation)?

What would be the obstacles in working to an outcomes-based framework for the civil service?

A number of themes emerged from these discussions. We have opted to report in detail the obstacles to implementation and then to simply summarize the more positive comments received:

Prima facie the framework appeared complicated to some civil servants and they suggested that one government body/agency should be responsible for collating and analysing the data. On the other hand, vesting this responsibility in the hands of one agency abdicates responsibility to that body and hence individual ministries may feel no ownership of outcomes-based accountability as a concept.

There were concerns about the validity and reliability of data and a likely tendency to falsify results. In the Kazakhstani civil service system, where ‘punishment’ for ‘failure’ is the norm, civil servants are much more risk-averse than in developed countries and would be reluctant to endorse the approach, thus highlighting its limitations rather than working to improve its application.

One such limitation highlighted was that the baseline data contained in the framework and its improvement over time were not exclusively within the gift of government ministries, but spanned state-owned enterprises and the business and non-governmental organization (NGO) sectors, yet government would be held accountable for actions outside their direct control.

Some civil servants argued that Kazakhstan was not yet ready for ‘well-being’ as an outcomes-based accountable measurement system. The country has just celebrated 25 years of independence from the Soviet Union and to expect a sophisticated system of well-being to take root was unrealistic and too challenging for Kazakh mentality (‘mentalitet’ in Russian).

A number of the baseline indicators are not easily shifted in the short term (e.g. life expectancy, social connections and civil engagement) and there was impatience among the political elite to see dashboard indicators that showed signs of immediate progress, both as a confidence-building measure to local people and to demonstrate that Kazakhstan was progressing on the global stage. Outcomes-based accountability could be counterproductive in that if Kazakhstan performed poorly against the well-being indicators, then it could be denied access to OECD membership.

A more general concern expressed was that indicators, once established, skew behaviour towards their attainment and, as a result, other parts of public service provision are neglected. There was therefore an in-built tension between a ‘less is more’ approach (fewer indicators are better) to the formation of a well-being framework for Kazakhstan and a plea for more indicators under each of the thematic areas on the basis that they were too limited in their scope to measure such important functions as the environment, health and education.

An outcomes-based accountability system demands horizontal (cross-departmental) working. Some civil servants saw this as an opportunity for ministries in Kazakhstan to highlight the fact that it was ‘others’ (rather than them) that failed to deliver on results – scapegoating writ large.

On the positive side, and broadly reflective of an overall strand of opinion, one group of civil servants noted:

Outcomes-based accountability will pinpoint how government activities are aligned with Kazakhstan’s major strategic goals as set out in Kazakhstan 2050 and the Plan for the Nation. This offers greater operational freedom for ministries and will help officials focus on tasks which benefit the public and minimize unnecessary activities. It should also provide an incentive for greater collaboration between the government, business sector and the general public. In short, outcomes-based accountability will promote innovation and creativity in the public sector, something which is absent in a largely centralized and punitive system within which officials currently work.

By way of improvement, this group of officials suggested disaggregation of the data to the regions of Kazakhstan, where there are growing levels of disparity. Benchmarking against successful regions would offer the potential for countrywide improvements of public services outcomes.

More generally, this research has illustrated an example of isomorphic mimicry through an agenda that prioritizes civil service reforms as the key aspect of good governance in Kazakhstan. External funders implicitly ‘shore up’ this agenda for change through a global managerial model that they apply to developing countries. In so doing, it privileges form over functions and, as a consequence, decouples civil service reforms from improvement in public services. This need not be a pessimistic conclusion because as the capacity of the civil service improves over time, there may be a greater receptivity to the idea of outcomes-based accountability as a functional transformation that should lead to improved well-being for the citizens of Kazakhstan. We summarize our findings in Figure 4 using the Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff (2015) framework adapted for Kazakhstan.

Figure 4.

Civil service reform in Kazakhstan.

However, could the adaptation of the OECD well-being framework for Kazakhstan also be seen as an exercise in isomorphic mimicry, in a similar vein to following global trends in civil service reforms? The OECD is very explicit about the limitations of the framework, seeing it as a starting point for discussions with policymakers and statisticians, which ‘is intended as a resource to identify ways to develop measurements of well-being in developing countries. Frameworks are tools that countries need to adapt and own, according to their own priorities and specificities’ (Boarini et al., 2014: 20). This prompts a discussion about the challenges of outcomes-based accountability as an approach in Kazakhstan and more widely for developing countries.

The research available warns against seeing outcomes-based accountability as purely a technical issue limited to the purview of academics and statisticians (Scrivens and Iasiello, 2010). In the example here of applying the framework to Kazakhstan, the researchers are acutely aware of the subjectivity involved in the selection of indicators, driven, in part, by the availability of existing data. The measurement of well-being is also a political process reflecting public policy priorities within countries (Trewin and Hall, 2010). It cannot be assumed, for example, that the dimensions of well-being outlined for Kazakhstan (in Table 1 in Appendix 1) are equally weighted. Their relative importance must reflect political priorities over technical accuracy. Political priorities, in turn, will embody the values of Kazakhstani society. Yet, the dominance of Nur Otan as a political elite may well usurp the views of ordinary people as to what constitutes improved well-being. Given the party’s influence over public officials, such a framework could be manipulated to give the appearance of progress on well-being through a highly selective approach to indicators. More fundamentally, Salvaris et al. (2009) argued that the debate on well-being prompts country-specific questions as to: ‘What is progress?’; ‘What does it mean in practice?’; ‘Progress for whom?’; and ‘Who should decide this?’.

Proponents of outcomes-based accountability emphasize its democratic credentials as a way of legitimizing progress against agreed outcomes (Wimbush, 2011). As Hall and Rickard (2013: 28) point out:

indicators’ legitimacy relies on ensuring that a wide swathe of the public is engaged and thus feels ownership in the results, feels that the right things are being measured, and believes that the indicators used to measure them are meaningful.

In short, from the OECD’s perspective, a well-being framework can strengthen democracy through deliberative processes of consultation and public reporting via the media of progress against indicators of performance. Yet, in some former Soviet countries, this is a very Western view of the world. Public consultations in Kazakhstan, for example, tend to attract limited engagement. In part, this is a historical legacy but it is also because people have limited trust in government and feel that their opinions will count for little, although the role of social media in reacting to government activities is increasing. Moreover, holding government to account through the press, which has limited freedom for independent analysis, undermines the potential of well-being as an accountability mechanism to leverage improvement in the quality of people’s lives.

So, the lessons from civil service reforms in Kazakhstan are salutary. To avoid well-being suffering a similar fate of ‘empty mimicry’, its read-across from the OECD must be mindful of those factors that have the potential to make its adaptation and impact limited in practice. These include: the gatekeeping role of Nur Otan as a powerful political influence on the executive; the judicious selection and relative weighting of indicators that constitute well-being in Kazakhstan; the potential role for consultation to reflect public priorities of quality of life; and the role of the media in holding the government to account for their performance.

Conclusion: a change of focus?

The scale of the task for Kazakhstan is huge if it is to meet its declared objective of joining the top 30 developed countries by 2050, yet the prognosis of the constraints is fairly clear, both from the research literature and from the practical outworking of the reforms to date. Government effectiveness may improve only marginally if the focus of public sector reform is institutional or structural changes to the civil service independent of a focus on a ‘results-oriented governance system’ set out in the Plan for the Nation. A more professional civil service, in and of itself, will not lead to more efficient and effective government – it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This speaks directly to the OECD’s (2014: 229) findings on Kazakhstan, which suggested that it adopt best practice from OECD countries ‘where there is a trend towards the identification of few core indicators oriented towards outcomes in areas that are considered to be strategic priorities’.

Can civil service reform in Kazakhstan become a trajectory to the 30 most developed countries? We conclude that structural changes in isolation from outcomes-based accountability as a reform model will contribute little to the overall goal of the Plan for the Nation. Linking a civil service reform agenda that includes restructuring, objective selection and recruitment, ethical standards, anti-corruption measures, and performance appraisal to an outcomes-based accountability framework is more likely to improve the well-being of Kazakhstan’s citizens and, as a result, positively contribute to government effectiveness and its place among the top 30 most developed countries.

Footnotes

Saltanat Janenova is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.

Colin Knox is Professor of Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.

Appendix 1

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