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FIGURE 1 No
Yes
Single, well-placed “anchor” for driving reform
Problem defined top-down
Definitive action plan specified fully in advance
Significant reliance on quantitative targets
Rigidity in implementation
Explicit links to crosscutting reforms
Results scaled up through top-down leadership PDIA
Recursive Delivery Model / Experimentalism
Linear Delivery Model / “Deliverology”
Figure 1 uses the juxtaposition of PDIA and the linear delivery model in Manning & Watkins (2013), fig. 3 to locate the recursive, experimentalist model in the contextualizing discussion.13 The findings presented here show that the ETP and GTP, and PEMANDU within them, operate in a recursive way rather than a linear way, and that recursion is institutionalized in ways that foster the generation of articulate, often formalized knowledge at many levels. By providing a set of tools for generating and exchanging information, the unit has helped create an organizational model that allows actors to revise their own goals and routines while maintaining discipline and momentum.14 How it has done so, how its governance arrangements have inadvertently failed or been successfully gamed, and broad areas where it could still improve, should thus be of substantial interest for both public management and for the devising and steering of “transformation” programs of varying scope. The experience of Malaysia and PEMANDU, moreover, sheds light on, and are illuminated by, a range of experiences elsewhere, such as the recursive or experimentalist elements in Chinese industrial policy or emerging experiments in developed-world governance.15
For ease of exposition we omit consideration of the public sector reform management program PSRM), presented in Blum, J., Manning, N., & Srivastava, V. (2012). For discussion of PSRM see Manning & Watkins (2013), which notes the controversy concerning the possibility that this program perpetuates key aspects of the Washington Consensus in a new form (ibid, 14). 14 This is notable since, especially in its earliest years, the unit was often seen as—and presented itself as—much more akin to the first model, and as a challenger and potential successor to the civil service. 15 The former as the “point and surface” model cited above (and discussed at further length in the conclusion); on the latter see De Burca, Keohane and Sabel (2014) or, at smaller scale, in state-level innovations in the US, such as Statestat in Maryland. 13
Doing, Learning, Being: Some Lessons Learned from Malaysia
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