Organizational culture and public sectorreforms in a post–Washington consensusera Lessons from Ghana’s good reformers

Progress in Development Studies 12, 2&3 (2012) pp. 135–151

Organizational culture and public sector reforms in a post–Washington consensus era: Lessons from Ghana’s good reformers
Francis Y. Owusu
Department of Community and Regional Planning,
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
Abstract: Reforming Africa’s public sector has been on the agenda of African governments and their development partners for decades and yet the problem persists. This failure can be attributed to two related factors: solutions to the ‘African public sector problem’ have been dictated by external interests, and the policies have ignored the experiences of organizations within those countries.
This article contributes to the search for effective reform policies by making the case for inclusion of the experiences of organizations within each country. Using the concept of organizational culture as a framework, I propose an approach based on the following claims: In every country there are some public organizations that perform relatively well, given their constraints; there is the need to understand why and how there are poor and good performing organizations within the same country; and information from such analysis should form the basis of public sector reform policies.
The applicability of the approach is demonstrated with a study of Ghana.
Key words: Organizational culture, public sector reform, post–Washington Consensus, public sector performance, Ghana, Africa

I Introduction
Bureaucracies in many poor countries suffer from low capacity, often do not deliver effective services, and are frequently staffed with poorly trained, poorly remunerated, and poorly motivated public servants. Yet there is another reality in most of these same countries – a reality of well-trained and committed public servants, well-functioning organizations, and efficient services. (Grindle,
2003: 91)

Few will dispute that many public sector organizations in Africa are mired in

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