Public Administration Reform: Lessons from the World Bank

The World Bank and other international aid agencies have long been engaged in programs to strengthen public administration functions of client country governments across the developing world. Questions about how effective such efforts have been in bolstering public sector performance remain unanswered. And, in a fast-evolving aid environment, the future of donor support for public administration reforms faces a range of challenges. Drawing on decades of cross-regional operational experience, Nunberg’s talk highlights the contextual drivers of these programs, identifies some of the constraints that have inhibited their success, and offers ideas for improving the record going forward.

Barbara Nunberg is a leading expert on international public management and governance, specializing on civil service reform in developing areas, on which she consults to a wide range of international organizations and governments and has published extensively. Much of her career was at the World Bank, where she held a series of progressively senior posts and was engaged in analytic and operational work in all geographic regions. In her last position, she headed the Public Sector Reform program for East Asia and the Pacific.

She is currently Visiting Scholar at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. She has taught on a visiting basis at UC Berkeley, Georgetown, Duke and NYU and has been a Visiting Fellow at UCLA’s School of Public Affairs and Harvard’s Kennedy School. She recently served as Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Her current research interests center on public human resource management in Brazil, institutional issues in international development assistance, and the politics of civil service reform in post-conflict settings. Nunberg holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and a B.A. from Barnard College.