The Start of a Research Journey on Peruvian Public Administration in Canada
Diving into the complexities of Peruvian public administration, Marcel Ramirez embarks on a PhD journey at the University of Victoria, aiming to unravel the enigma behind the gap between policy recommendations and effective reforms.
It has been almost 31 years since I landed my first job in my home country Peru. I was recently out of the economics department and although, at that time, I had no particular interest in working as a public servant, the opportunity arose, and I embraced it. I can divide my professional career into two distinguishable phases:
A period of almost 15 years, as a committed public servant with a strong quantitative approach trying to improve service delivery both at the strategic and the front-end levels. This was almost exclusively through an efficiency lens, and
The remaining years as a public policy consultant and professor committed to improving service delivery where I had an ongoing question in my mind: why does the laundry list of technical recommendations and good practices (from local and international organizations) not turn into effective and successful policy reforms?
In other words, for the last years, many public policy recommendations piled up without turning into effective policy reforms. Having that conundrum in mind, I decided to start a PhD in Public Administration at the University of Victoria having realized that the missing link would probably lie in the highly undiscovered and misunderstood machinery of the government.
These are some of the research questions I will be focusing on in my research:
Why are so-called public sector reforms already implemented not successful or even evaluated?
What are the factors that determine the relative success of public administration reforms?
What is the possible mix of (internal and external) factors which could increase the probability of reform success?
How much could inherited colonialism have influenced current public institutions in Peru?
What is the role of the capability gap, as well as leadership and culture in executing more successful reforms?
My research will cover several new public administration issues, especially the persistence of reforms implemented in the early 90s and how posterior reform waves have interacted with the former. In addition, I will identify the several pathways by which past events and reforms have produced today’s complex patchwork quilt of Peruvian public administration.
I will also compare the relative effectiveness of wholesale reforms as opposed to piecemeal reforms and how public policy reforms can be linked to public administration reform processes. As a quantitative researcher who has converted to qualitative methods, I will rely mainly on field observations, comparative case studies, and in-depth interviews. I might even get deep into comparative institutional analysis in Peru as well as in other Latin American countries.
There are some very interesting attributes of Canadian public administration scholarship that I find quite relevant for my research: the impact of federalism on public policymaking and its implementation, how the whole-of-government and other horizontal collaborative approaches have worked and are working (as well as the more citizen-centred reforms), and how public administration is dealing with the interests of local indigenous populations.
One main concern throughout my research would be how to disseminate the newly acquired knowledge so that I can also promote advocacy efforts to make authorities and scholars realize the importance of understanding and promoting a proper Peruvian public administration scholarship.