Can Top-Down and Bottom-Up be Reconciled? Electoral Competition and Service Delivery in Malaysia

World Development Vol. 40, No. 11, pp. 2329–2341, 2012 Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 0305-750X/$ - see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.03.023

Can Top-Down and Bottom-Up be Reconciled? Electoral Competition and Service Delivery in Malaysia WILLY MCCOURT * World Bank, Washington DC, USA University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Summary. — Top-down versus bottom-up is one of development’s enduring tensions, not least in public service delivery. In Malaysia, public services have traditionally been animated from the top down. Bottom-up forces in civil society have strengthened recently, but so too have top-down forces, and their impact on public services is greater. Malaysia’s experience suggests that where electoral competition gives politicians an incentive to respond to voters’ service preferences, top-down initiatives have the greater potential for large-scale social change. Participatory initiatives will be most effective when they play a supplementary role. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — Malaysia, South-East Asia, civic engagement, New Public Management, participation, democracy

perhaps the first in the recent development literature to propose it in as an alternative to control in regulating service delivery. 2

1. INTRODUCTION: REFORM FROM THE TOP DOWN AND THE BOTTOM UP Top-down versus bottom-up is one of development’s enduring tensions: development by elites on the people’s ostensible behalf versus development whose impetus comes from “underneath.” At the level of the state’s functioning, top-down has its classic expression in government planning, widely practiced but also widely disparaged (Escobar, 1995; Scott, 1998), while bottom-up has been expressed in participatory governance initiatives which we discuss below. The tension is acutely present in public service delivery, the locus for our enquiry, where it is expressed in bodies of literature which take the top-down and the bottom-up perspective and which fail to communicate with each other. That makes service delivery a very suitable vehicle for exploring whether it will be possible to reconcile these rival perspectives in international development. We propose the following study questions:

(a) Bureaucratic control: The hierarchical principle The management models which dominated developing country public service provision up to the turn of the century all promote service performance and accountability through top-down hierarchical control (McCourt & Minogue, 2001). That is true of the public administration model, essentially the application of Weber’s (1947) bureaucracy model to the public sector (Khan, 2005; McCourt & Minogue, 2001); the “Washington model” which emphasizes lean and meritocratic administration through pay and employment reform and improvements to finance and staffing procedures (Lindauer & Nunberg, 1994; Manning & Parison, 2004); and the New Public Management (NPM) model, which has been influential in the World Bank and elsewhere in development, and which we outline now as the model most relevant to our case. NPM centers on establishing clear lines of accountability between ministers and their departments; defining performance in an unambiguous and measurable way; delegating authority to chief executives (arguably NPM’s central plank: see OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation, 1995); establishing incentives that reward or punish results relative to the agreed outcomes; and reporting and monitoring performance (Bale & Dale, 1998: 106). Recent developments such as the growth of public-private partnerships and network governance (Kuriyan & Ray, 2009; Rhodes, 2007) have not dislodged it. On the contrary, the technology of monitoring performance has grown ever more sophisticated, with performance management indicators that are outcome—rather than output- or input-based, and which generate elaborate performance data. Performance management is widely practiced by international development

1. What is the comparative value of top-down and bottomup approaches to service delivery in Malaysia? 2. What explains whatever value they may have? 3. What, if any, is the relationship between them? 4. What are the implications for other developing countries? We present a case study of Malaysia to answer them (Eisenhardt, 1989; George & Bennett, 2005). As we shall see, Malaysia is a country where the state has dominated its people for most of its independent history, but where bottom-up forces have strengthened in a fascinating way in recent years. 2. CONTROL AND VOICE IN SERVICE DELIVERY In this paper, “top-down service delivery” refers to services where priorities come from “the top,” from either bureaucrats answerable to politicians or directly from politicians themselves. 1 The relevant mechanism is hierarchical control. “Bottom-up service delivery” refers to services where priorities come directly from citizens, through their exercise of what Hirschman (1970) called “voice.” Samuel Paul (1992) was

* I acknowledge the support of a British Academy grant, and for the help of the project research officer, Lee Meng Foon. I am grateful for the comments of Richard Batley, Ken Coghill, David Hulme, Nahee Kang and two anonymous reviewers. Final revision accepted: March 27, 2012. 2329

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agencies. In an important sense, the MDGs are performance management on a global scale (Goldsmith, 2011). Gaming is inherent in performance management. Agencies have an incentive to perform sub-optimally (a “threshold effect”), fearful that if they exceed this year’s targets, the bar will be set higher for next year (a “ratchet effect”). They also have an incentive to manipulate the performance data, if they are allowed to. However, even critics of such dysfunctions have tended to favor mending, not ending the regimes (Bevan & Hood, 2006). Clearly, NPM operates from the top down, over the heads of its beneficiaries. Some NPM reformers have compensated for that through devices like “clients’ charters” which set out minimum standards of service that clients can expect. They have been introduced in many countries, including India and, as we shall see, Malaysia (Sharma & Agnihotri, 2001). However, only 16 out of 1,000 people polled in the mid-90s in the UK, where the charter movement began, were both familiar with a Charter and satisfied with it (O’Conghaile, 1996). The criticism persisted that UK public agencies were paying lip-service to citizens’ views, being “concerned with the citizen as a consumer and not as a participating democrat,” as one of the UK’s leading political commentators observed (Jenkins, 1995: 262). Likewise, the priorities of international development agencies were seen as managers’, not citizens’. In rich and poor countries alike, those priorities have been stigmatized as “managerialist” and a cloak for bureaucratic self-aggrandizement (Clarke & Newman, 1997; Dar & Cooke, 2008; Ferguson, 1990; Pollitt, 1993). In the NPM model, the “clear lines of accountability” referred to above resolve into a quasi-contract in which performance expectations are made explicit through performance indicators on which department and agency heads are supposed to deliver. However, the contract is still between state departments and their politician and civil servant principals, and administrators keep their distance from the public. It is politicians who are subject to parliamentary scrutiny, and subject to “vertical accountability” to citizens (O’Donnell, 1998), classically answering for their officials through the ballot box (Weber, 2004). (b) Voice and participation: Citizens setting priorities Citizen participation in governance, Hirschman’s “voice” doctrine applied to public services, goes back at least as far as Athenian direct democracy. While it was integral to the “Basic Needs” approach in the late 1970s (Paul, 1987), its current ascendancy in development dates from James Wolfensohn’s restoration of poverty to the center of the World Bank’s mission in the late 1990s. The landmark Voices of the Poor report, with a foreword co-written by Wolfensohn himself, set the tone for a new poverty agenda. Very relevant to us, it found that public agencies were among the most important institutions in poor people’s lives. Unfortunately, it also found that poor people viewed them as among the least effective. For the most part, Voices of the Poor’s respondents specified no particular mechanism for improving those agencies’ performance. But the Report was particularly sensitive to complaints such as those from a Vietnamese interviewee that “All decisions are top-down . . . all the people can do is what they are required to do as informed by the village manager.” It called for “organized communities that can participate in devolved authority structures and keep local governments accountable” (Narayan, Patel, Schafft, Rademacher, & Koch-Schult, 2000: 283; see also Figures 10.1 and 10.2).

World Development Report (WDR) 2000/01 built on this aspect of the Report. It advocated making public agencies directly accountable to the public via the media, the courts and advocacy by civil society organizations: “The quality of public service is reduced when public officials are held accountable more to their hierarchical superiors than to the people they serve” (World Bank, 2001: 101). The Bank was thinking of innovations in Latin America, notably participatory budget-setting (the well-known Porto Alegre model), which make officials directly accountable to their clients (Ackerman, 2004; Santos, 1998; Shankland & Cornwall, 2007). Goetz and Jenkins (2001) have called this new doctrine “diagonal accountability,” since the agents of vertical accountability—citizens and the groups which represent them—were now participating in “horizontal” scrutiny mechanisms. 3 It is a radical departure from the public administration doctrine of vertical accountability as we have outlined it. The new doctrine was amplified by WDR 2004, which focused on service delivery. The argument now was that elections are an inadequate way for citizens to control what state agencies do in their name: “Democracy is not built through top down political institutions.” Moreover, “given the weaknesses in the ‘long route’ of accountability (classic vertical accountability, in other words), service outcomes could be improved by strengthening the ‘short route’—by increasing the client’s power over providers” (DFID, 2010: 52; World Bank, 2004b: 6). 4 This argument was bolstered by Amartya Sen’s view of participation as valuable in itself. It was the “process aspect” of freedom, part of what constitutes development and not merely of instrumental value. In this way, “empowerment” or “upside-down governance” came of age as a complete alternative to top-down reform, and with a strongly normative and aspirational character (IDS (Institute of Development Studies), 2010, Sen, 1999: 291, 2002: 10; World Bank, 2001: 112). With the two most recent issues of World Development hosting articles recognizably within the bottom-up paradigm at the time of writing (Bland, 2011; Schultz, Duit, & Folke, 2011), it is the latter which currently dominates the development discourse. The critique of the “long route” was pessimistic by implication about democracy as a way of controlling the behavior of state agents. After all, there would be no need for diagonal accountability if vertical accountability was working properly. Khan (2005) makes the pessimism explicit. In his view, the politics of developing countries is inherently dominated by contests between rival patron-client networks, which are a rational way for political entrepreneurs to capture state resources. This economic logic is very little affected by either the presence of absence of democracy and (in our terms) vertical accountability. Khan argues in addition that democracy fails to identify a coherent set of social preferences, as it has been claimed to do, because citizens’ preferences are incompatible. Studies which show patronage being fueled by electoral competition in countries as far apart as Italy and Sri Lanka are consistent with Khan’s view (for example Moore, 1985 and Tarrow, 1967). Experience from India, celebrated in WDR 2004, illustrates both the strength and a weakness of the new short-route accountability doctrine. A “citizen report card” survey in Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka state in 1993, initiated by Samuel Paul who was admirably acting out his own convictions, identified an abysmal citizen satisfaction rating of 9% with municipal services. Following press coverage and action by the state government, satisfaction increased across two subsequent surveys to 48% in 2003 (Paul, undated). The World Bank evaluated the initiative positively (Ravindra, 2004).

CAN TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP BE RECONCILED

The evidence that “voice” was improving services, just as the new doctrine had said it would, stimulated replications of Paul’s experiment in countries as far apart as Ethiopia, Malawi, the Philippines, and the Ukraine (see for example Wild & Harris, 2012). However, Paul himself was more cautious than his admirers. He conceded that service quality started to improve in the context of a wider urban reform program introduced by the Congress party state government which came to power in 1999. In fact the program was wound up in 2004 by an incoming state Chief Minister who believed that its urban bias had lost the Congress party votes. Here is the weakness that we have referred to. Just as we reported earlier, Paul’s initiative suffered from the perception that it served a sectional interest, the urban interest in this case. 5 That may be more typical of bottom-up initiatives than exceptional. Mansuri and Rao’s (2012) review of experience with participation concludes that participants in civic activities tend be wealthier, more educated, of higher social status, male, and more politically connected than nonparticipants; and that the poor often benefit less from participatory processes. In a democracy, almost every adult can vote, but only some people “participate.” Thus we reach Whitehead’s (2002: 76) crucial distinction between political and civil society: “A substantial gap will remain between the universalistic conceptions of modern political society and the more restrictive and exacting notion of civil society.” Civil society may be less “civil”—more sectional, less truly representative—than the idealistic advocates of voice care to recognize. 6 (c) “Control” and “voice” in context Our outline of the control- and voice-based approaches was, of course, an abstraction from the actual practice of governments. We all know nowadays that context matters. Yet it is almost a condition of the most widely peddled models that their practical application has been problematic. Among the control-based approaches, the NPM measures are found disproportionately in Commonwealth countries like Jamaica, Tanzania, and Tonga which have links with NPM’s AngloSaxon countries of origin (Pollitt and Talbot, 2004; President’s Office, 2005). The “Washington model” has been much more widely practiced, but not very successfully, as even World Bank staff admit, right up to a 2010 internal paper with the provocative title, Why do Bank-supported civil service reform programs have such a poor track record? (see also World Bank Independent Evaluation Group, 2008). In the structural adjustment era when donor-driven top-down reforms so often failed to win indigenous support, we were forced to learn about the influence of indigenous institutional and political factors. Indeed, the failure of those reforms partly explains the rise of the bottom-up approaches. To a large extent, that is why we have the current emphasis on country ownership of reform which has been embodied in the Paris Declaration (World Bank, 1998: 52-3; see also Dahl-Østergaard, Unsworth, Robinson, & Jensen, 2005; Nelson, 1990; Rodrik, 1996). 7 The normative and aspirational voice-based literature has been slow to accept that context affects voice as much as it affects the top-down approaches, even though the “voice” initiatives have been concentrated in very specific locations, often in middle-income countries and especially in Latin America, and implemented in idiosyncratic ways. Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, perhaps the locus classicus of short-route accountability along with Bengaluru, has accounted for only a

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modest proportion of the municipal budget. Officials still hold most of the purse-strings. An optimistic report of an attempted replication in El Salvador admits that participatory budgeting has fallen into disuse in 60% of the locations where it has been attempted. Evidence emerging from Africa is also disappointing (Bland, 2011; Booth, 2011; Gaventa & McGee, 2010; Teivanien, 2002). 8 Even two impressive accounts of informal, bottom-up accountability concede that it is at best a weak substitute for properly functioning formal accountability (Hossain, 2010; Tsai, 2007: 371). That indifference to context, mixed with the powerful support of international development agencies for the bottomup approaches, has prompted a concern that those approaches might be “ground, pasteurized and converted into new appendages of conditionality” (Santos, 1998: 507). 9 3. TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP IN MALAYSIA: BEFORE 2008 We proceed to our case study. Our field data come from semi-structured interviews conducted in November 2010 and February 2011: 15 with senior state officials up to cabinet minister and Secretary- and Director-General (head of department) level, three with outside bodies that contribute to government policy, and eight with major national Nongovernment Organizations (NGOs) (the international NGO and donor presence is trivial in Malaysia). Most interviews were at federal level, but we also interviewed an advisor to a state government controlled by the national opposition grouping, and the Mayor of one of Malaysia’s largest local authorities. We purposively sampled the policy areas of environment and health, identified by Hassan and Weiss (2003) as areas where civil society is relatively strong. Selection of interviewees was done by the author based on previous research and working knowledge of the Malaysian public service. 24 of the 26 interviews were recorded and transcribed (two interviewees declined to be recorded). Typed notes were also taken. (a) Top-down before 2008 Up to the turn of the century, there was a near-consensus that the Malaysian state, and the national executive most of all, dominated its society. Malaysia was a federation, but the formal powers of its states were puny, and its electoral and judicial commissions had to answer to the federal Cabinet, with predictable consequences (Brown, 2005a; Yeoh, 2010). 10 Its government was a “repressive–responsive regime.” It was repressive in its raft of measures which included the Internal Security Act and the Printing Presses and Publications Act. (That Act severely restricts conventional but not Internet publication.) However, it was also responsive because the ethnic basis of the ruling coalition required leaders to respond to their ethnic constituencies (Means, 1996; see also Case, 2002; Crouch, 1996; Zakaria, 1989). Two factors explain this pattern. First, there is the monolithic and consociational nature of the governing coalition, the Barisan Nasional (National Front), centered on the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) which over time has co-opted what were until recently the other major parties: the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) and the Penang-based and mostly Chinese Gerakan party. Second, there is the performance legitimacy which derives from the Barisan’s skillful handling of political challenges such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and, even more, the ethnic rioting that broke out three decades

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earlier on May 13, 1969 in which at least 196 people died and 6,000 were made homeless. The state’s response to the riots was a characteristic and effective mixture of repression and responsiveness (Kanbur, Rajaram, & Varshney, 2011). On one hand, there was a ratcheting up of coercion and restrictions on free speech. On the other hand, there were the affirmative action measures of the “New Economic Policy,” which gave the “Bumiputera” (Malay and other indigenous) majority, UMNO’s constituency, a stake in the economy, and which led to greater income equality (UNDP, 2007). Some observers have added a third, cultural factor: the premium which Malaysian society arguably places on authority. It is identified by Andaya and Andaya (2001) and Mansor and Ali (1998), among many others. It is denied by Brown (2005b) and Jesudason (1995). Crucially for us, the executive’s dominance translated into strongly top-down public administration. The American historian Barbara Tuchman (1966) said of British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury that he “regarded himself not as responsible to the people but as responsible for them.” Likewise, Scott (1968: 252) remarks of Malaysia that “The traditional reliance on high-status leadership has created a situation tailor-made for domination by the administrative elite. Both the bureaucrats and those they guide find this relationship quite natural and appropriate.” The template was set at the same time that the ruling coalition came together. There has been an unbroken sequence of Five-Year Plans from 1956, the year before independence. Until the 10th and latest Five-Year Plan, every commitment had its own budget line. Malaysia’s much-imitated “Vision 2020” is the capstone of the planning edifice. There has been a series of reforms in the core civil service. The 90s saw the introduction of total quality management (International Standards Organization/ISO 9000), client’s charters and an individual performance management scheme which was almost unique among developing countries in being linked to pay (Sarji, 1995). These reforms were recognizably within the NPM model outlined earlier, with some direct borrowing from the UK’s citizen charter and other reforms. However, there was little delegation of authority, NPM’s central plank, and administration remained highly centralized (McCourt & Lee, 2007). Malaysia’s 1990s reforms have been dismissed as little more than window-dressing (Common, 1999; Siddiquee, 2006). Indeed, it is hard to see how Malaysia’s client’s charters could have had a greater impact than their lackluster UK progenitor. Also, Khan’s clientelistic analysis is reflected in criticisms of “crony capitalism” during former Prime Minister Mahathir’s later years in office (Gomez & Jomo, 1997). Those criticisms have been reflected, in turn, in a drop in Malaysia’s rating in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). On the other hand, unlike World Bank-sponsored civil service reforms of the same period elsewhere (Nunberg, 1997), Malaysia’s reforms were implemented under its own steam with strong political commitment, and they were mostly still in place when we wrote. For example, Prime Minister Mahathir personally chaired all ten of the meetings which designed the performance management scheme. In 2004, 12 years later, the scheme had a major overhaul (McCourt & Lee, 2007), and it was undergoing a second overhaul in early 2012 when we completed this paper. (b) Bottom-up before 2008 As noted already, we are using NGO influence on environment and health policy as our barometer of bottom-up forces in Malaysia. We note at the outset that, consistent with

Mansuri and Rao’s findings, Malaysia bears out Whitehead’s distinction between universal political and restrictive civil society. NGOs active in this sector have always had a limited catchment area. Their members are disproportionately nonMalay, urban, English-speaking, and middle class (Hassan & Weiss, 2003; Ramakrishna, 2003). Moreover, Malaysian NGOs are for the most part service advocates rather than providers, unlike in some low-income countries like Bangladesh (Batley & McLoughlin, 2009). The NGO sector is well-established. For example, the Malaysian Nature Society was founded in 1940 and the National Cancer Society was founded in 1966. Yet NGOs’ relationship with the State has often been uneasy. Restrictions have been placed on NGOs which have political objectives, so that the Malaysian branch of Amnesty International, for example, was (and still is) obliged to operate as a private company. They were targeted in “Operation Lalang” (“Weeding”) in 1987 after the foreign minister named NGOs as five out of seven “thorns in the government’s flesh.” NGO environmental agitation had led to the closure of a Japanese-owned refinery in Perak state, a severe embarrassment to a government courting foreign investors. One hundred and six people were arrested under the Internal Security Act, including officebearers of two NGOs where we had interviews. The fact that advocacy groups are unrepresentative of Malaysia as a whole made it easy for the government to depict them as “arrogant intellectuals” (the words of Anwar Ibrahim in the late 1990s while he was still Mahathir’s Deputy) in thrall to special interests. This reinforced the state’s tendency to relate to them in a top-down way: When I was state director I never talked to NGOs. Before it was information, information—government telling you what it was doing, trust the government . . . Ministers calling NGOs for a meeting: I never heard of that ten years ago. 11

4. AFTER 2008 (a) How new is “new politics”? The 2008 general election was a watershed in Malaysia, even though some of the changes that we now discuss occurred gradually over a decade or more. The “political tsunami,” as veteran Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang described it, gave the Opposition an “irrevocable breakthrough,” increasing from 22 to 82 of the 222 seats in Parliament and, most dramatically, capturing five of the 13 states (Brown, 2008: 744; Weiss, 2009: 758). The “new politics” (Loh, 2009) has its proximate origin in Mahathir’s sacking of his charismatic deputy Anwar Ibrahim in 1998. Anwar’s revenge was to assemble a coalition which performed creditably in 1999, fell back in 2003 after Abdullah Badawi replaced Mahathir, and then capitalized in 2008 on the subsequent disillusion with Badawi. As we shall see, the changes after 2008 have been substantial. However, while the institutional framework has not been augmented in the federal government’s favor, it remains largely as it was under Mahathir. The repressive legislation has not been repealed (though in late 2011 the Prime Minister declared an intention to repeal the Internal Security Act), and the powers of the states remain limited (Amnesty International., 2010; Wong, 2010). (b) Top-down after 2008 The 2008 election precipitated the accession of Najib Razak as Prime Minister, replacing the discredited Badawi. The

CAN TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP BE RECONCILED

Opposition campaign had tapped anxieties on crime, corruption, and the economy. The government was vulnerable because growth had not returned to its “stellar” rate after the Asian financial crisis, and inequality had worsened (World Bank, 2010). In response, the Government developed a Government Transformation Programme (GTP) in 2009 and an Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) which it unveiled in October 2010. We focus here on GTP. 12 GTP boils down to a set of outcome indicators, the “National Key Result Areas” (NKRAs) which are listed in Table One, together with our own compilation from official sources of progress toward them. They are supplemented by further sets of indicators for every government department and every individual minister. They were framed to appeal to a wide range of voters. They are relevant to both urban and rural dwellers (different from Bengaluru in that respect). The poverty NKRA, addressing income inequality, was clearly designed to appeal to UMNO’s Bumiputera constituency, still poor on average relative to the other ethnic groups. The government has lifted the NKRA methodology straight out of the NPM primer, borrowing it from Government-Linked Companies and government departments which had been using key performance indicators (KPIs) for almost a decade. Najib was briefed on moving from output to outcome indicators by Michael Barber (2007), the former Head of the UK government’s Delivery Unit, and he followed the UK’s lead in using KPIs to manage the performance of his own ministers (the UK influence again). After revision at three semi-public workshops attended by the entire Cabinet (“no absenteeism,” said one attendee), the PM signed off on his ministers’ KPIs personally. At the time of our interviews he was in the middle of his second round of six-monthly individual review meetings with them. The new Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) in the Prime Minister’s Office is the vehicle for GTP. Idris Jala, the former Chief Executive Officer of Malaysian Airlines (MAS), a publicly-owned corporation which had used KPIs to return to profitability, was appointed to the Upper House with Cabinet rank to run it. Mr. Jala brought with him the “laboratory” method he had used at MAS. The KPI workshops, which had already started, were now opened up to civil servants at large, and around one thousand of them eventually took part. This was participation of a kind. “The days of government knows best are over,” said Najib, incessantly (for example, Razak, 2010). But it was co-opted, not representative participation. None of the NGO representatives whom we interviewed was invited—“They are more interested in my vote than my view.” In keeping with the Malaysian style of public consultation, government had the last word: “(Najib) wants to be seen to be listening, but it’s still coming from the top down” said one of our interviewees; “Voters like decisiveness,” said another. Far from devolving power to its line ministries in keeping with the NPM doctrine which Malaysia has followed in so many other ways, GTP has reinforced central management authority. The NKRAs were made public, but not the ministerial and departmental KPIs. (The minister whom we interviewed said of the latter that “We were a bit too cautious—we didn’t want to raise expectations too high.”) However, in the policy areas of environment and health on which our data-gathering focused, they are far from cosmetic. Environment has a target of good air quality days. Kuala Lumpur’s “haze” is a domestic concern which became an international one during the 2002 Commonwealth Games when forest burning in adjacent Kalimantan was at its height (air quality statistics were an official secret

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until former Prime Minister Badawi overruled his deputy in 2005). Health has incorporated the health MDGs into its KPIs, with the result that the MDG for HIV/AIDS (MDG6) has become salient, as it was the only health MDG which Malaysia was not achieving when we did our interviews. Moreover, underneath the NKRAs and ministerial KPIs is a plethora of other indicators. There are department heads’ own KPIs and their (separate) annual appraisals with the Head of the Civil Service, “star ratings” of department performance conducted by the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), and the reports of the government’s auditor-general; not to mention the ISO 9000 quality ratings and client’s charters from the 90s which survive as fossils. “This is legacy, no one has reviewed. (Government) circular is there, we have to keep on doing.” (c) Top-down outcomes We should note that we had to compile Table 1 ourselves. Surprisingly, government appears not to have done so on its own. Moreover, we could find no evidence for some NKRAs, notably those on rural infrastructure. However, the Table is perhaps sufficient to demonstrate that GTP is a good deal more than a cosmetic reform, despite what has been alleged with its predecessors and despite the possibility of a Hawthorne effect. 13 There are similar figures for the lower-level KPIs. While the figures are not published let alone audited, there are corroborating examples of local development orders 14 being processed in three months rather than the previous twelve, and out-patient clinics in a state health service opening daily for the first time. How much credence should be given to the NKRA figures? In January 2011 the government assembled a credible international panel to review GTP’s first year. It included an Australian public service commissioner, an International Monetary Fund Resident Representative and a co-founder of Transparency International (TI). They were fulsome: “a great success;” “impressive;” “extraordinary” (PEMANDU (Performance Management, 2011: 199, 200, 202). Surprisingly, however, they did not comment on the government’s failure to meet one of only two internationally benchmarked NKRAs, the TI Corruption Perceptions Index score, a failure which, oddly, the government omitted from its otherwise exhaustive firstyear Report. Nor do they seem to have taken account of the vigorous web debate about the improvement in poverty reported in Table 1—has hardcore poverty really been abolished with so little fuss?—or the discrepancies between the NKRAs as reported in the first GTP Annual Report and in the original “roadmap.” However, echoing Bevan and Hood (see above), the panel did recommend that GTP statistics should be audited “to preserve authenticity and validity.” (Malaysia’s Department of Statistics is not independent: it sits alongside PEMANDU in the Prime Minister’s Department.) In its response to the international panel’s report, the government merely committed itself to acting on the panel’s feedback “where it makes sense to do so” (PEMANDU (Performance Management, 2011: 203, 206). 15 These seem important reservations to us. Yet a merely cynical government would not have given a hostage to fortune by publicizing the NKRAs, and hitching some of its KPIs to numbers over which it has no control. In doing so, it was creating “rods for our own back,” the phrase that a UK minister used to describe the UK’s performance regime at the same stage of its development (The Observer, 1999: 9). Moreover, the NKRAs and KPIs were supported by fresh resources. For example, 4,000 police officers were appointed to address

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT Table 1. National key result areas (“outcome” targets only)

2010 target Reducing crime 20% reduction of street crimes

2012 target

Reported progress in 2010

5% annual reduction in overall reported index crime

Street crime down 37% overall crime index down 16%

Corruption Malaysia’s CPI score at 4.9 (from 4.5) 37% finding Government efforts on corruption effective in TI Global survey (from 28%) Average audit findings per ministry at 10.6 annually (from 11.2) Improving student outcomes Pre-school enrollments at 72% (from 67%)

CPI 2010 score 4.4 48% finding government efforts effective in TI Global survey

Pre-school enrollments at 87% All children having basic literacy and numeracy skills at end of year three

Poverty Poverty incidence at 2.8% (from 3.6%) Hardcore poverty at 0% (from 0.72%) Rural infrastructure Peninsula: 91.4% living within 5 km of a paved road (from 91%) 16,000 new/restored houses for rural/hardcore poor 24-hour electricity access: Peninsula: 99.6% (from 99%) Sabah: 81% (from 77%); Sarawak: 73% (from 67%) Access to clean/treated water: Sarawak: 62% (from 57%); Sabah: 59% (from 57%) Urban public transport 13% using public transport in Klang valley between 0700 and 0900 (from 10% to 12%) 75% living within 400 meters of public transport route (from 63%)

72.42% enrollment

(13,471 households removed from poverty)a Hardcore poverty at 0% Close to 100% Additional 34,000 houses

90% 90% 25%

17%

1. TARGETS: Government Transformation Programme Roadmap (January, 2010). 2. PROGRESS: http://www.pemandu.gov.my/gtp/, accessed February 8, 2011. a Redefinition of poverty base-lines has blurred targets.

the street crime target, and cash grants in the spirit of Latin America’s fashionable Conditional Cash Transfers (Hanlon, Barrientos, & Hulme, 2010) were doled out to address the hard-core poverty target. Further, the semi-public way in which ministers’ KPIs were generated means (as one department head put it), “We are scrutinised, it’s open. Unless you think Jala and the PM are fools, you’re not going to set the bar low. There is peer pressure.” The fact that even two very senior officials whom we interviewed were unaware that there was such a thing as gaming suggests to us that Malaysia was still in the first flush of honest enthusiasm with outcome indicators when we did our interviews. Thus the government’s intended progress toward achieving its GTP targets followed this sequence: set NKRA/KPI targets; incentivize and monitor ministers, ministries, and Heads of ministries to achieve them through KPIs; support them with fresh resources; achieve targets. Might the government’s achievements have had some entirely different cause apart from its Government Transformation Programme? For example, might the reported drops in street crime and hardcore poverty reflect an improved economy? We know that both those things track the economy elsewhere. However, there was no economic surge that would

account for the dramatic improvement. On the contrary, growth was negative in 2009, the year before the first annual figures for GTP which we have reported here. Nor do we see any other plausible counterfactual that could explain the improvements. Bombarded with publicity through PEMANDU’s website and publications, and frequent paid full- or even double-page copy in the press, not to mention a triumphalist public rally in March 2011, the public shared the positive view. In February 2012 69% of voters said they were satisfied with the Prime Minister’s performance, up from 34% in early 2009 (Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, 2011). At least some of that satisfaction can safely be attributed to GTP, the flagship program of Najib’s first three years in office. (d) Bottom-up after 2008 Very different from the 80s and 90s, NGOs now interact frequently with the government. Representatives of the same NGOs whose members the government was imprisoning in the 1980s sit on advisory panels like the Environmental Quality Council. Every public clinic has a Board of Advisors with local community representation. In both Environment

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and Health, ministers have invited NGOs to informal annual dialog sessions. NGOs were not only present at the workshops at which Malaysia’s Climate Change policy was thrashed out, but an NGO representative chaired one of them, something for which our interviewees could find no precedent. Our interviews suggested three reasons for the change. First, there is a requirement to consult in Acts of Parliament such as planning legislation which borrow from industrialized country models (Common, 1999; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000); and also in international bodies and agreements such as the UN’s Human Rights Council. The international dimension is significant. Malaysia has an open economy and is subject to customer pressure. European timber customers require compliance with the Pan-European Forest Certification Council’s independently audited requirements. (“Now we are selling the timber through the markets—the market will have the final say.”) A government official, fresh from the 2010 climate change conference in Cancu´n, Mexico, emphasized that Malaysia has been a beneficiary of international NGO lobbying on behalf of developing countries as well as a target. Second, five of our interviewees pointed to the role of the media in fostering a climate of dialog in a post-Berlin Wall world in which the government’s fear of communism, dating back to the Communist insurrection of the 1950s, has finally been laid to rest. This applies strongly to the new media, which the government has not tried to control, unlike in China. 16 Half a million of Malaysia’s 28 million people accessed the independent website Malaysiakini on election night (Weiss, 2009)—“State and civil society would still be far apart without the Internet.” Moreover, after 2008 even government-controlled media have started to give a platform to voices from NGOs whose members the government used to imprison. Third, it is clear that the government’s interaction began in earnest following the accession of Mr. Badawi in 2003, and has intensified following the 2008 election. However, if the relationship between the state and NGOs is no longer confrontational, it still has a particular style. An official summed up what he had told us about his ministry’s interaction with NGOs as “education and awareness, then technical (input), then consultation.” The government’s first preference is for NGOs to act as its outreach arm, sponsoring activities such as inter-varsity environment debates and awareness of elderly care. “We brief (the NGOs) on any new programmes . . . so that they can implement in the community.” As a jaded NGO interviewee put it, “When we (i.e. the government) see NGOs—ah, awareness! They decide, we (the NGOs) disseminate.” Its second preference is to obtain technical data which it lacks, as with bio-safety, where an NGO’s lawyers actually drafted the government’s policy (cf. Bratton, 1989). “Data” may include knowledge of communities. NGOs have been used to consult indigenous “orang asli” groups in Sabah and Sarawak; and on HIV/AIDS policy, groups like sex workers whom the government would rather keep at arm’s length. However, this means that an NGO may be ignored if it lacks technical knowledge, which the government may prefer to obtain from a university or a consultant. (“They rely on consultants. The state doesn’t see civil society as a resource.”) An official whose ministry “seldom” seeks advice from NGOs remarked that “Generally, NGOs are small outfits with limited funds.” Consultation on policy, the government’s third preference, takes a limited form. Unless enshrined in law, it depends on the attitude of ministers and their officials: “Our Minister is very open. When he took office, he invited more than 20 NGOs . . . for a special session to meet him.” But another ministry had never sat down with NGOs: “My minister is wary about how to

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engage.” The typical pattern, according to several of our NGO respondents, is that NGOs are invited to give their views—a departure from previous practice—whereupon the government side “listens, but they don’t respond.” Even when there is a statutory requirement, consultation may still be on the government’s terms. In an effort to show that the government takes the Community Health Councils seriously, an official commented that “The minister has hand-picked the members from MCA, MIC and UMNO.” Perhaps the sectional nature of Malaysian NGOs is a factor here. The Mayor whom we interviewed became testy when we pressed him on NGOs’ policy influence, and rattled off a few of the other groups he feels obliged to heed: “600 residents’ associations . . . planners, architects, business associations, tourist associations, hoteliers.” In this context, an NGO working in health has become influential by appointing figurehead Chairs with excellent connections to the government and using their knowledge of “the system” to secure a favorable policy stance. It has then traded on popular deference to the government to overcome community resistance to its often controversial initiatives: “If you say, look, we’ve got the decision, so let’s get on with implementing it, they accept that.” This “weapons of the weak” strategy has sometimes meant having to swallow a policy that the NGO finds objectionable. (e) Bottom-up outcomes How much policy change has come from the bottom up? We asked all the relevant government and NGO representatives this question, and their answers appear as Table 1 below. (Readers should recall that what we report from Environment and Health is only a sample of the range of government policy, although civil society activity in those areas is comparatively strong.) We make the obvious qualification that our list is based on NGOs’ own estimation. 5. DISCUSSION Let us now try to answer our study questions. We acknowledge our data limitations, especially the fact that the top-down GTP reform was still in the early stages when we gathered our data. 17 (a) Comparing top-down and bottom-up service delivery in Malaysia Our first study question was: What is the comparative value of top-down and bottom-up approaches to service delivery in Malaysia? The achievements listed in Table 1 are clearly more substantial than the bottom-up successes of Table 2. That is the case even after we discount for the government’s over-selling of its own accomplishments. We remind readers that the NKRAs are supplemented by the lower-level KPIs on air quality, clinic opening hours, and so on. Far from the policy inertia for which the government has been criticized by Common and others, in the interstices of the monolithic institutional framework there has been real change from the top down. The top-down achievements are still more substantial even if we take NGOs’ contribution entirely at their own estimation, and extrapolate in addition from environment and health to other policy areas. Our second study question concerned how we should explain the above successes. To answer it, we begin with civil society. Malaysian NGOs have benefited from the national government’s new leniency when they deviate into

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Table 2. Perceived NGO successes in influencing state policy in environment and health Environment  Establishment of the Department of the Environment  Toughening of air quality regulations  More stringent fines for breaches of the Wildlife Act  Introduction of a Solid Waste Bill  Protection of individual hills, forests and wetlands  “Round table” on palm oil cultivation Health  Introduction of cervical clinics, mammography, and breast self-examination  Participation in “Healthy Lifestyle” Programme and campaign to reduce sugar consumption  Introduction of methadone maintenance and needle exchange programs for intravenous drug users (in context of HIV/AIDS)

campaigning from the handmaiden roles which the government mostly prefers. They have also benefited, as several interviewees pointed out, from three other factors: a more educated and cosmopolitan society, the freedom of the Internet, and the international influences we have reviewed. By accepting a “subordinate interlocutor” role, civil society has been able to influence policy in some areas, albeit at the price of becoming identified with policies it sometimes finds distasteful. However, a “subordinate interlocutor” role is not the same as state co-option, or as the “cherry-picking” of compliant NGOs which used to occur. It is true that in general, they have not taken a confrontational stance. In our interviews, two of them contrasted themselves with their more aggressive counterparts in Korea and the Philippines. However, there is little “resource dependence” (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978): NGOs have not benefited by obtaining substantial state resources. Moreover, even the most radical NGOs in our sample accepted that government has started to consult them. Now that the state is no longer actively repressing them, we can arguably view NGOs’ relative docility as a tactic of constructive engagement; perhaps also as an instance of the almost instinctive deference which, in the view of many, characterizes Malaysia’s “strong state” tradition. To continue answering our second study question, we turn to the changing role of national government. The government’s implementation of GTP has been more incisive than its earlier client’s charter and other NPM reforms. The latter may have been superficial, but the plethora of performance indicators which they spawned built the capacity on which GTP’s KPI methodology has drawn. The government has also benefited from the more sophisticated international understanding of performance technologies. In addition, the government has increasingly consented to be informed by NGOs. However, above all else we emphasize the electoral imperative. It was the 2008 election which brought Najib to power, and GTP is his personal initiative (the international panel was concerned that GTP is “vested in the Prime Minister alone” [PEMANDU (Performance Management, 2011: 202]). His motivation was clear, both from his speeches and our interviews. Now that Malaysian politics has become competitive, public policy is seen through the election prism just as it has always been in the United States (Mayhew, 2004). “Public perceptions (of government performance) will make or break the next election.” So when “some very experienced ministers said, ‘I don’t need that (i.e. GTP), I’ve been winning elections,’” (as a cabinet minister informed us), the Prime Minister’s blunt reply was: “We must change or we will be changed.”

Thus, to the extent that GTP has been a success, it is based far less on short-route, bottom-up accountability than on the classic top-down long route that leads to the ballot box. In Whitehead’s terms, the government has responded much more to political than civil society. To be sure, civil service agencies or social movements such as BERSIH and HINDRAF have made themselves part of political society by channeling their energies into electoral politics. 18 However, civil society has also benefited from the improved atmosphere which successive general elections have created. (b) The relationship between top-down and bottom-up in Malaysian service delivery We advance to our third study question. We have said already that if forced to choose between the top-down and bottom-up initiatives, we would have to opt for the former. But the choice is unnecessary because their relationship is complementary rather than antagonistic. The government increasingly recognizes NGOs’ superior ability to disseminate information and liaise with communities and groups, and their technical expertise where it exists. On their side, service-orientated NGOs have been willing to meet the government half-way. A department head was entitled to claim that his department works on “a smart partnership basis” with NGOs. How far do current state-society models go in explaining this pattern? Certainly the government’s increasing reliance on NGOs reflects some of the “resource dependence,” in this case toward other actors in society, which Pfeffer and Salancik originally identified and which has become the influential “network governance” model’s strongest rationale (Rhodes, 2007). From another point of view, the interaction between the state and NGOs is an incipient “embedded autonomy,” that dense network of ties between state agencies and the private sector and civil society which Evans (1995) identified. However, we resist the facile synthesis which those models imply for Malaysia. We ask readers to recall the typical pattern of interaction: education, expertise, and consultation, in that order. We also ask them to dwell on the NGO representative’s jaded remark that government officials “listen, but don’t respond.” Why do they do that? In the first place, it is because that is what they have always done in Malaysia’s strong state tradition. But if they carry on in this way even after they have become receptive to civil society, it is because they believe that having listened to all and sundry, it remains the government’s job to make its own judgement of the public interest. The Mayor whom we interviewed was clear that he had little choice over this. His citizens are increasingly educated and voluble, he said, but in Malaysia’s tropical climate they are much more interested in blocked drains in their neighborhood than in the minutiae of public policy. (Their interest is reflected in one of the Mayor’s own KPIs, which concerns potholes in the municipality’s roads.) The case of a state government which fell to the Opposition in 2008 is instructive here. It had inserted a provision into the State Forestry Act requiring a majority vote in the State Assembly on any significant proposal affecting forests (forestry is one of the states’ main competences). A state adviser who had an NGO background himself explained that the intention was to “enfranchise the voters” in Malaysia’s executive-driven politics. Despite the new administration’s sympathy with NGOs (“philosophically, we’re on the same page”), he said: “I disagree with the view that NGOs should be the driver . . . I’m doubtful about the claim that NGOs are the most expert or representative . . . They’re not a substitute, they’re a supplement;”

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supplementary, that is, to the views of politicians as voters’ elected representatives, and of their appointed officials. For state actors at every level and of every political complexion, the “strong state” tradition of noblesse oblige was shading into a claim to legitimacy based on the democratic mandate of political, not civil society. In Tuchman’s words, there was a movement from a posture of responsibility for the people toward one of responsibility to them. Those actors had no more expectation than Khan that elections would uncover any uniform set of social preferences. But they implicitly believed that election victory had given them the remit to construct one of their own, with electoral competition hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles if they misread voters’ wishes. For, as Karl Popper (1999: 94) has remarked, “Any government that can be thrown out has a strong incentive to act in a way that makes people content with it.” GTP, and also the Economic Transformation Programme, are in effect the set of preferences which government has constructed. This is “responsive rule” as May (1978: 1) defined it: “necessary correspondence between acts of governance and the wishes with respect to those acts of the persons who are affected,” a definition framed to give policymakers discretion in identifying and acting on those wishes. Responsive rule puts the onus on elections as a test of citizens’ wishes, being different from short-route accountability in that respect. It becomes a major role of the Opposition to provide policy contestability. Thus the Pakatan Rakyat opposition deserves some of the credit for GTP’s provisional success. By vigorously challenging GTP’s pretensions, for example by asking questions in Parliament about PEMANDU’s heavy spending on consultants, it is the agent which has introduced competition into Malaysian politics and given the Barisan the incentive to raise its game. Even a Barisan cabinet minister has recognized the need “to have checks and balances so that the present government will not be swollen-headed, arrogant and abuse the system.” (Koh, 2012: 13). 19 In this way, sustaining GTP’s provisional success may depend, very ironically, on the Opposition as much as on the government. Anyone interested in Malaysia’s public service delivery, including the Barisan government itself, necessarily has an interest in a strong Opposition. It is therefore a matter of national as well as party political concern that, at the time of writing, the Opposition had lost momentum, suffering setbacks in by-elections and internal party management, and with Anwar himself only recently acquitted in a law suit for something that is not a crime in many countries where this article will be read. (c) From patronage to programs in Malaysia Malaysia’s transition to programmatic politics is incomplete, as anyone familiar with the politics of Sarawak in East Malaysia will realize. (See Brosius [1999] and Gomez and Jomo [1997: 110-16]. An Internet search will supply more up-to-date material, including the effect of corruption perceptions on the April 2011 Sarawak state elections.) Moreover, just as we completed this article, the government was proposing a substantial pay increase for its key civil servant constituency, a move that was hard to separate from febrile speculation about an imminent general election. However, the transition has still been substantial. We are left to explain why political competition has increasingly taken the form of rival political programs rather than clientelism and rent-seeking of the sort that Khan considers endemic in developing countries. We suggest three reasons. First, competition has emerged only very recently, when clientelistic tendencies

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have been dampened by the availability of resources outside the state (Theobald, 1990). Malaysia’s experience contrasts in this respect with that of Sri Lanka, where after independence in 1957, patronage was locked in by intense political competition, with the incumbent party losing the first five post-independence elections (McCourt, 2007). Second, the state has instilled meritocratic practices. They are reflected in Malaysia’s improved rating for government effectiveness in the World Governance Indicators). 20 Third, it is realistic to vote on the basis of programs, not patronage, because the state has shown in the past that competent service delivery is possible. (We shall return to this third reason.) (d) Implications for other developing countries We now address our fourth study question. We have found that in Malaysia, the pessimism of WDR 2001 and 2004 about long-route accountability is misplaced. So also is their optimism about short-route accountability, because it makes the state accountable to a narrow range of voices. Nor, while allowing for “crony capitalism,” is Khan’s pessimism about democracy descending into patronage and rent-seeking borne out either. Thus we suggest that at the very least, we should recognize Malaysia as a limiting case of the superiority of “short-route” accountability. To go further, we must address the transferability of Malaysia’s recent experience, whose uniqueness we have been at pains to stress. Previous Malaysian reforms, especially “Vision 2020,” have been transplanted to many places, including Africa; and Malaysia, as we saw, has itself borrowed heavily from other countries, especially the UK. For, while paying due respect to context and path dependence, policy transfer between states does frequently take place, albeit usually through a process of adaptation or “localization” (Acharya, 2004; Cerny, 1995; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000). With judicious attention to context, and with governments which are masters in their own houses, as Malaysia’s is, the constraints on transfer become a difficulty, not an impossibility (Booth, 2011; Moore & Houtzager, 2003). More important still, we have recent evidence from low-income countries of electoral competition’s efficacy. In India, previously a by-word for electoral patronage, Gupta and Panagariya (2010) have identified a positive relationship between state-level economic growth and the election fortunes of incumbent political parties. Voters who could see nothing to choose between the politicians of previous generations are now finding that competent and honest state administration is possible even in very poor states, because that is what Chief Ministers like Nitish Kumar in Bihar have been providing. They are starting to reward the parties that deliver it and punish the parties that do not. India, Gupta and Panagariya claim, is experiencing a “revolution of rising expectations.” Recent evidence from Brazil and Colombia corroborates that finding (Fried, 2012; Guerrero, 2011). Admittedly, we lack any such evidence for the other major developing region, sub-Saharan Africa (Booth, 2011). But there is evidence that African citizens also assess politicians on whether they deliver substantive benefits, much as their Indian counterparts have started to do (Bratton, 2010). We have learned from “Drivers of Change” and other studies of the politics of reform that politicians respond to incentives (Dahl-Østergaard et al., 2005). It appears that politicians and parties in different developing regions are starting to realize that they have an incentive to deliver results which will create the electoral reward which Indian and Malaysian administrations have started to obtain.

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6. CONCLUSION The picture we have tried to paint is of a political system which for most of Malaysia’s independent history has had a strongly top-down orientation. Malaysian civil society has indeed moved some distance toward the Latin American/WDR 2001/2004 model, in response to the same global trends. The governing coalition’s roots in Malaysia’s three major ethnic groups mean that it was always somewhat responsive. But its responsiveness has increased dramatically since real political competition has emerged. In Tuchman’s words, political competition has engendered a movement from responsibility for the people to responsibility to them. Yet paradoxically, the ruling Coalition’s response to political competition has moved it away from the bottom-up model. Classic vertical accountability has got stronger, not weaker. The NKRA/KPI methodology has put officials firmly under the politicians’ thumbs, with the politicians, for their part, exquisitely conscious that they are answerable to their increasingly discriminating electorate through the ballot box. Meanwhile, the institutions which provide horizontal accountability have remained weak, and there is little diagonal accountability to speak of. Citizens mostly seem content to have the state in the driving seat. We have resisted creating a false dichotomy, and equally a facile synthesis, between political and civil society. Reformers who are exclusively top-down or bottom-up orientated fight with one hand tied behind their backs. That is perhaps a permanent legacy of Bengaluru’s, Porto Alegre’s and other bottom-up initiatives. (It is also a legacy upon which the Malaysian government has only just begun to capitalize.) The growth of civil society organizations in Malaysia is a positive development, and the independence of agencies like BERSIH and Amnesty International is something they are right to defend. But in service delivery, civil society will be most effective when it joins forces with a legitimate government which controls the most powerful levers of deliberate social change and allow it to take the lead. We remind readers of the comment from a federal official that “NGOs are small outfits with limited funds,” and from a state adviser that NGOs should play a “supplementary” role. Their influence on government will be greatest when it is channeled through the electoral process. Civil society advocates will have to put up with being heard by government but not always heeded, and sacrifice some autonomy and purity for the sake of influence on public policy, because that is where there is the greatest potential for large-scale social change. “Protesta con propuesta” (protest

plus proposal) was the slogan coined in Latin America by NGOs when they began to engage constructively with the state after a period of high-minded but ineffectual opposition (Mitlin, 2007). It applies equally to Malaysia. Thus, finally, the Malaysian case suggests that top-down and bottom-up can shake hands at the electoral hustings, where civil society organizations and citizens in general exercise their democratic scrutiny and convey an “instruction to deliver” 21 to the successful candidates. Candidates will honor that instruction when they can rely on a capable bureaucracy; when they are not afraid to borrow management technologies from the private sector and from abroad to achieve their democratic objectives (the techniques are not inherently “managerialist”); and when they allow themselves to be informed, but not instructed, by “restrictive” civil society. To the extent that those conditions do not exist in other developing countries, then the implication of our analysis is that it is worth working toward them. In the light of our analysis, the weakness of Khan’s analysis is that it is static, and does not allow for the change which was starting to occur in Malaysia and elsewhere even as he wrote. Development agencies which opt impetuously and imperiously for the “short route” out of understandable frustration with the seemingly intractable politics of many low-income countries could lock in a short-route accountability mode that even persuasive advocates like Hossain and Tsai recognize is unsatisfactory, and subvert the necessary task of strengthening the democratic long route. 22 Making proper allowance for its democratic and civil liberties shortcomings, Malaysia is development as it was meant to be before Voices of the Poor and “participation” came along: indigenous in origin and therefore owned, planned from the top down, relatively equitable and, in the absence of civil strife since May 1969, harmonious. It is a country whose abidingly compliant and mildly repressive character may not be to the taste of some readers. However, as a state whose government is recognized as efficient and which has belatedly allowed civil society some room to maneuver, is it to be blamed for not dancing to the latest tune? Almost everyone accepts that the Malaysian government was right to send the International Monetary Fund (IMF) packing in 1998, including, implicitly, the IMF itself (IMF (International Monetary Fund), 2004). Might it also be right to go its own way in the face of the present fashion for participation? And might our case study show, finally, that the advocates of bottom-up have at least as much to learn about providing inclusive public services from the advocates of top-down as vice-versa?

NOTES 1. Or indeed from cadres in socialist governments, where the Weberian separation between appointed and elected officials does not apply. 2. Paul also discusses “exit” (another term of Hirschman’s) in the form of competition from nonstate providers as a second alternative. See Batley and McLoughlin (2009).

was not a disinterested party, being a former Chief Secretary of the Karnataka state government who subsequently joined the Board of the Public Affairs Centre, the NGO in Bengaluru which sponsored the initiative.

4. See Fox (2007) for a detailed discussion of accountability.

6. This is not a new insight. The point was recognized following the wave of participation experiments in countries like Libya, Tanzania and Yugoslavia in the 60s and 70s as well as industrialized countries like the US (Dwivedi, 1982; Mayhew, 2004; Miller, 1970; Pagano & Rowthorn, 1996; Richardson, 1983; Wolfe, 1970).

5. The Report Card initiative was not repeated in its place of origin after the 2004 state election in Karnataka. We note that the author of the evaluation study which conferred the World Bank seal of approval

7. See http://www.oecd.org/document/18/0,3343,en_2649_3236398_ 35401554_1_1_1_1,00.html.

3. See also O’Donnell (1998).

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8. Teivanien (2002: 629) also notes that “If one considers the legislature to be an important organ of democratic institutionality, it may seem problematic that the local legislature tends to have its powers diminished by the participatory budget planning.”

14. See http://202.75.6.111/Akta/Vol.%206/Act%20267.pdf, Section 22.

9. Santos was prescient. “Process conditionality” in the form of a requirement for governments to consult civil society has become integral to the design of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the lending vehicle that replaced structural adjustment loans, with initiatives like Porto Alegre and Bengaluru’s held up as models. See World Bank. (2004a). See also DFID (Department for International Development) (2005, Section 3.6) and UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2010) for the participation model in the policy advocacy of other official development agencies. Cramer, Stein, and Weeks (2006) and Dijkstra (2011) criticize this aspect of PRSPs. Bland (2011) is one example among many of donor-sponsored participatory budgeting.

16. See http://www.skmm.gov.my/index.php?c=public&v=main.

10. See Article 122B of the Constitution giving the Prime Minister power over appointment of judges. The phrase “kwanjon minbi” (“government primacy over the people”) has been used in South Korea to describe a similar phenomenon (Evans, 1995: 233). 11. We follow the convention of italicizing direct quotations from our interviews. 12. The Economic Transformation Programme was launched at the end of 2010, too late for us to study. 13. Readers unfamiliar with this term may consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect.

15. Similar suspicions have been voiced in the UK and the US (Bevan & Hood, 2006).

17. It has been argued that development initiatives should only be regarded as successful when they have delivered benefits for at least 10 years (Bebbington & McCourt, 2007). 18. See www.bershih.org and www.hindraf.org. 19. “Even if (political) programmes should fully agree, there should be at least two parties, so that the opposition can control the honesty and administrative skill of the majority party.” (Popper, 1999: 136). 20. Shefter (1977) similarly emphasizes the importance of a constituency for bureaucratic autonomy forming before the advent of universal suffrage, as in Britain in the late nineteenth century, rather than after it, as in Italy. 21. Barber’s (2007) book title quotes former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s paraphrase of the message which voters had supposedly conveyed in the 2003 general election which Mr. Blair’s party won. 22. See Booth (2011) on the limitations of short-route accountability in Africa.

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