Contenu du sommaire : Coopération administrative internationale et développement.

For co-operation based on a clear-cut contract. Questions to Stéphane Hessel Stéphane Hessel answers six questions relating to French policy on administrative coopération with the developing countries, the role played by the IMF and the World Bank in this area, the temptation for ‘administrative imitation', the priority sectors and, lastly, the problems of evaluating the operations carried out. He focuses on the diversity of both the aid granted and the situations to which it must be adapted, and proposes a ‘graded assessment' for aid operations.

“Can one teach the art of government without being an administrator oneseif ?” Comments by Edgard Pisani Is it possible to teach the art of government and administration without being in either government or administration oneself ? Yet this is precisely what co-operation in the field of organization and management of the State machinery seeks to do. This co-operation — which is tremendously important — can take various forms. Specific, local, and technical assignments should be particularly encouraged.

What are consultants for ? The structural adjustment policies being introduced in several developing countries are starting to recognize institutional issues and problems as an important factor in the implémentation of these policies. In a good many cases this calls for far-reaching administrative reform. The question is one of determining the extent to which private organizations and foreign and local consultants can help to design and implement these reforms, given their often political character and the influence of social and cultural conditions on administrative structures and on the attitude of government officials and civil servants.

French policy : from symbols to facts «French administrative co-operation» consists mainly of exports. In the developing countries it touches every aspect of administrative activity : training, public administration and institutional reform. It has two contradictory traits : a fairly strong politico-administrative will accompanied by relatively well-defined projects on the one hand ; and a certain cumbersomeness resulting from overlapping sources of finance and, above all, from increasing diversification and the multiplicity of often ill-matched supply and demand operations, on the other. The future of this co-operation appears to be rather finely balanced, coming as it does within the scope of foreign policy which is as much a question of symbols as of facts.

Management training for officiais and institutional coopération : the dual expérience of Quebec's ENAP in Africa. This article describes two expériences led by Quebec's ENAP in Africa : cooperation with Maghreb ENA and Management training for senior civil servants in Africa. The author raises questions rather than gives answers. Management development and development management are the two pôles of intervention of the ENAP.

FRG : Public policies implemented by independent organizations The originality of Germany's administrative co-operation machinery lies in the implémentation of assistance by independent organizations governed mainly by private law (including political foundations financed by the government and affiliated to the major political parties). It currently covers three priority areas : initial and ongoing civil service training, government finance, and local and régional authorities. Other priorities earmarked for the future include environmental protection. Decision-makers, future administrators and teachers are the main beneficiaries of this assistance ; in future, it will be extended to include middle-ranking technicians.

Swedish Aid for Administrative Development Since 1982, administrative assistance has been a special sector coming under the responsibility of the Swedish Agency for International Development Aid, which acts through various public bodies, consultancy firms, and foreign and international organizations. The purpose of this assistance is to make the public services of the recipient countries both more efficient and more démocratic and sensitive to the needs of the people. The accent is mainly on training officials, tackling the problems of financial management, supporting decentralization and developing alternatives to computerization.

Italy : How should the activities of public and private operators be coordinated ? Italian co-operation is the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It involves a variety of actors, each with an independent set of goals. «Institutional operators» provide training and assist in the reorganization of the civil service. The government supports and partially finances the operations conducted by the ‘project operators', especially in the fïeld of training. The large Italian companies provide indirect assistance in the fleld of public sector management, by organizing management training as well as courses in human resources management.

Getting higher returns from technical assistance through better management A swift analysis of international technical coopération in the last thirty years shows the ineffectiveness of really considerable amounts of aid. The recipient countries feel that this aid is usually imposed without taking their needs into consideration, resulting in a chaotic proliferation of projects and programmes that are inadequately matched to their realities. For the donor countries, weak decision-making mechanisms and concentration of power are behind the rise of an inefficient bureaucracy. To ensure that the results and objectives of technical assistance have long-lasting impact, a sweeping reform of the public sector has to be carried out. Each operation should correspond to a real need, be given political backing, be based on a real dialogue between récipients and donors, and be accompanied by an évaluation. What counts is the cumulative effect of technical assistance. Self-reliance in development management can only be achieved in a climate of partnership, where developing countries themselves administer the technical aid they receive as a démonstration of their ability to manage development.

Administrative co-operation between the EEC and the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP) under the Lomé Convention Administrative co-operation forms the core of the operations financed by the European Development Fund (EDF). The assistance provided by the EEC to the public services of the ACP States can either accompany specific operations linked to the implémentation of development programmes and projects ; take the form of a specific project for developing the management skills of a department of public service ; or form part of a planned sériés of concerted actions aimed at revamping and rationalizing administrative structures. Coupled with this co-operation, the author underlines the need to stick to the original management tools used in implementing financial and technical co-operation, and shows how these original arrangements work in the administration of public contracts. In his conclusion, the author urges the negotiators at Lomé IV to consider ways of making better use of national human ressources so as to promote a genuine spirit of reciprocity and partnership between the foreign teams of technocrats and national civil servants and thereby enhance the effectiveness of administrative co-operation.

Cooperation in the field of staff management : issues and obstacles Structural adjustment policies very often provide for a contraction of the public sector through measures for modernizing and rationalizing the civil service. An increasing number of developing countries are turning to BIT for assistance in implementing these measures. From the very outset, schemes for reforming the civil service, still few and far between, run slap into the difficulty of marking out clearly the boundaries of the public sector and, a fortiori, of the civil service. The schemes also have to take into account issues such as the government's degree of attachment to the policy of reform, the institutional context, the level of training of officials responsible for staff management and, finally, the difficulty of forming an established team of officiais responsible for the implementation of a reform programme.

Foreign technical assistance and the civil service of developing countries Administrative reforms are today incorporated into structural adjustment programmes and constitute the preconditions for granting loans. We are witnessing a return to substitute assistance at the bilateral level. The institutional reform programmes being implemented at the multilateral level are ill-matched to the administrative environment where they are introduced and often pursue objectives that are incompatible with existing administrative strategies and reforms. The adverse effects of technical programmes are well known today. This assistance cornes up against obstacles created by the numerous internal constraints operating in the countries and by its own often-bureaucratic organization, dominated by macro-economists who, far from reducing, inflate the role of State organizations. There is need for greater coherence between the proposals and programmes offered under this assistance and the country's administrative System on the one hand, and improved management of this technical assistance on the other, either through its privatization or through the alteration of the status of international experts.

Franco-Congolese co-operation and civil servantes training : the case of Congo's ENAM The expérience of Congo's ENAM (Ecole Nationale d'Administration et de Magistrature) lies somewhere between «co-operation for co-operation's sake» (with a highly inadequate job description for experts, ill-adapted teaching content, purely formal evaluation, etc.) and «co-operation for development», in which each expert's assignment is no longer regarded as a contract but as a project whose ultimate aim is training national counterparts to take over.

International administrative co-operation : an impossible task ? Administrative co-operation is one of the most complex and ambiguous aspects of development aid. The current trend is for the aid to be less lackadaisical, less paternalistic and more egalitarian. A dialogue of real substance involving both governments and individuals — glimpses of which can be caught from time to time — should enable appropriate solution to be found to such fundamental problems as need assessment in specialist administrative assistance, sélection and préparation of development experts, sélection and training of local staff in developing countries, coordination of assistance and, finally, logistics.

South-South administrative coopération and the challenge of adjustment To cope with economic and financial difficulties institutional reform is necessary. The principal actors involved in reform are the international financial institutions. Their financial logic favours the strengthening of North-South cooperation and the construction of integrated régional économie areas. South-South coopération is characterized by the growth of regional bodies for economie and administrative coopération, the overlap between their operations and those of the international agencies, and a certain financial vulnerability. The strengthening of South-South co-operation entails improving operational coordination, first among the organizations of the South and then between the organizations of the South and those of the North, and promoting models of institutional reform which are adapted to local socio-cultural realities.