Abstract
Nearly 4500 years ago, at the dawn of civilisation, the ruler of a Sumerian city-state in southern Mesopotamia, lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in modern Iraq, had a radical idea. For the first time in recorded history, Urukagina of Lagash proposed that public officials should work in the interest of citizens rather than of their leaders and themselves. This ambitious concept remains with us, fulfilled in some places, but still to be achieved in others. This region that gave birth to this innovation set humanity on an endless journey into urban living and in search of effective governance. The city, citizenship, and civilisation co-evolved with public administration to make possible cultural, political, legal, economic, and social development. This remarkable achievement is a reminder of the power of public service to transform any economy and society—just as today officials are called upon to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by 2030. This chapter suggests that the first known reform of public administration still has much to teach bureaucrats, politicians, and citizens alike. Furthermore, the fact that the first recorded reform of public administration ended in catastrophic failure is surely worth of attention, since so many other subsequent reforms have also failed. Perhaps more unexpectedly, it also argues that “what goes around, comes around”. In this context, public sector reforms of the twenty-first century are useful for interpreting the tantalisingly limited evidence from ancient cuneiform tablets about those Sumerian reforms. In so doing, it draws parallels between the uncertainty in the most ancient of civilisations and in the current context. It is equally possible but rather less usual to apply the insights from the present to understand the problems of the past. The intellectual stimulus in looking for principles guiding public administrative reform across such different times and contexts is to inform today’s pursuit of public service excellence, based on common principles and shared human values. Hence, this chapter is an attempt to examine public service reform by asking how the past and the present can illuminate each other. By tying together both ends of history of public sector reform , this chapter seeks to bind theory and practice to the needs of today, with the added benefit of providing insight into the past. Hence, this chapter puts forward seven “lessons” about public administration. These derive from public service reform in the city of Lagash and from reflections of public service reform of recent years.
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Notes
- 1.
Lagash was one of the city states on the great alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Its prosperity was largely due to its strategic location. Lagash then, like Singapore today, was highly innovative and can lay claim on important “firsts”—for example, the first recorded treaty has been attributed to a water deal between Lagash and Umma along the Euphrates drainage (second millennium BC). The civilisation of Assyria and Babylon, long known from the Bible, yet mainly myth, until it was rediscovered by nineteenth-century archaeology, emerged from a still older culture. During the fifth to the second millennium BC, the city-state of Sumer had developed around Mesopotamia. This infertile land, lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in modern Iraq, set humanity off on an endless journey into urban living and effective governance. Then, the city, citizenship, and civilisation co-evolved with public administration to make possible cultural, political, legal, economic, and social development.
- 2.
Three great—and interrelated—inventions of early civilization were agriculture, public works, and public administration. The bureaucrat fostered the planning, record-keeping, and numeracy needed for the other two to develop.
- 3.
“What goes around, comes around”.
- 4.
Urukagina, in his second year, dropped the title “ruler” (ensi) that had been used by his predecessors and assumed the title “king” (lugal—literally “big man”). This had not been used in Lagash since the reign of Eannatum but utilised by the rulers of Umma in their own inscriptions, so either Urukagina was seeking to adopt the mantle of his more successful predecessors or was claiming parity with Lugalzagesi. Under the kings of Akkad, a hierarchy evolved in which the lugal took precedence over the ensi.
- 5.
“Patesi” was the term for “ruler” used by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars; it was later replaced by the term “ensi”.
- 6.
These are collectively conveyed by cone-shaped cuneiform tablets, two of which may be found at the Museum of Louvre in Paris. These “Reform Cones” have been described as forming “… one of the most precious and revealing documents in the history of man and his perennial and unrelenting struggle for freedom from tyranny and oppression” (Kramer 1963: 79). In fact, almost all the text of the cones presents the actions and behaviours of state officials, that is, about public administration. The surviving texts present the reform process in two roughly equal halves: first, the background, and second, Urukagina’s actions. The arguments and evidence justifying the reforms emerge from the narrative.
- 7.
Indeed, building the city wall around the city of Girsu, the administrative capital of Lagash, was to prove critical for his regime survival, later on in his reign.
- 8.
Urukagina’s personal god was Ninshubur.
- 9.
In the absence of coinage, these fees were paid in kind, as in Lagash under Urukagina, a complex barter economy flourished. Wool, barley and fish were major export products, bartered for imports such as copper (Prentice 2010).
- 10.
Seven jugs of beer and 420 loaves of bread were paid to the priest for his services, while the undertaker was paid two barig (72 lt) of barley, one woollen garment, one lead goat, and one bed and one chair. However, the reforms seem, overall, to have the cost by about half: from seven jugs of beer to three, and from 420 loaves of bread to 80 or, when a person was buried, the amount of beer owed was cut from seven jugs to four, and barig of barley was reduced to one.
- 11.
According to Cooper (1983: 73), a “blind” person was a non-free worker, of lower status than the shublugal.
- 12.
Urukagina seems to blame his predecessor, Lugalanda, who had allegedly appropriated land in the name of his wife and children. The previous ruler had grabbed the best land for himself and used the sacred oxen from the temples to plough his own fields.
- 13.
The cones then repeat the argument that, from time immemorial, a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy was present across the whole country.
- 14.
It is possible that he came to power through a coup d’état, claiming to act in defence of the common people by ending abuse of public office and proclaiming how he was restoring social harmony.
- 15.
However, it seems unlikely that all officials were dismissed, but even sacking the most outrageous perpetrators of corrupt practices probably gravely weakened his regime (Kramer 1958: 89–94).
- 16.
- 17.
Enlil was the chief deity in the Sumerian pantheon. He was the father of Ningirsu, god of war, farming, and scribes. Bau (or Baba), wife of Ningirsu, was the goddess of healing. Nanshe, daughter of Enki (god of wisdom and fresh water) and Ninhursag (goddess of Earth), was goddess of social justice, prophecy, fertility, and fishing.
- 18.
Soviet historians, however, argued that Urukagina was elected by a popular assembly, perhaps a little like the way in which Lenin had used, and then dissolved the Constituent Assembly in 1918 (Diakonoff 2013).
- 19.
- 20.
Kramer of Sumer, paraphrasing Kramer 1961, http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197905/kramer.of.sumer.htm
- 21.
Two hundred years later, Gudea would make a similar decree: “To provide protection for the orphan against the rich, and to provide protection for the widow against the powerful”.
- 22.
Habeas corpus is a law that states that a person cannot be kept in prison unless they have first been brought before a court of law, which decides whether it is legal for them to be kept in prison.
- 23.
Especially on account of P222607 (Cone D).
- 24.
Perhaps similar to the disaster of the Iraqi occupation administration in 2003 sacking all members of the Ba’ath Party.
- 25.
The chief boatman, the head herdsman, the fisheries inspector, tax collectors, the priests at Ambar, shepherds, the surveyor, the chief lamentation singer, the steward of the temple estates, the brewer, and all the foremen.
- 26.
Perhaps reflecting the murder by Mussolini’s thugs of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 that triggered the Duce to dispense with the last vestiges of genuine democracy.
- 27.
In his book, Sumerische Tempelwirtschaft zur Zeit Urukaginas und seiner Vorgänger (Sumerian Temple Economy at the Time of Urukagina and his Predecessors).
- 28.
His ideas had already led Anna Schneider in 1920 to publish Die Anfange der Kulturwirtschaft: Die sumerische Tempelstadt (The Origin of Cultural Economy: The Sumerian Temple City) before he had actually researched the evidence.
- 29.
As a child, he had emigrated with his parents to the United States from Tsarist Russia to escape anti-Jewish pogroms that erupted in 1905 in response to the attempted revolution that year. Like other Jewish refugees from oppression, such as the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, he cherished the freedoms of opportunity and personal choice in America.
- 30.
In the term “amagi” or “amargi”, which literally means “returning to mother”.
- 31.
Even during the Stalin era of terror, he was accorded by the USSR authorities a remarkable degree of freedom. He was permitted to work abroad (including as visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1963), publish in Western academic journals, and engage with foreign scholars. He was clearly ideologically trusted.
- 32.
A view that seems clearly redolent of the justification by all Stalin’s willing executioners and gulag guards for the Moscow show trials of the 1930s.
- 33.
In reality, the structure of Lagash society and its economy still remain a speculation. Whether the “sangha-gar” was a senior administrator or a priest, or both is unknown. The extent of citizen rights or the obligations of servitude is not well enough documented to be more than conjecture. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the soldiers/farmers (sub-lugal) were independent citizens with private property or mere followers of chiefs (ugula) and team-workers (ru-lugal) under foremen. Nor do we know the extent of the authority invested in the priestly class (abgal or apkallu).
- 34.
Hence, the cones have rightly been described as “an obstinately difficult source” (Steinkeller 1991). Therefore, the obscurity of most cuneiform text allows translations that drive or are driven by differing or often wildly contradictory interpretations. In the name of accuracy and exact faith to the original, the tablets are also rendered into gibberish English—much as Latin used to be badly taught by the use of Loeb literal translations. This lamentable obscurantism seems to be because the academics either lack faith in their own guesswork, as to the real meaning of the original, or they fear the scorn of their peers (Foster 1981).
- 35.
Equally, in the United States, his “reforms” were seen in the 1930s as a “New Deal” to boost aggregate demand at a time of profound uncertainty (World’s Oldest Peace Treaty Carried a Curse. 1934. The Science Newsletter, 25 (690), pp. 403–404).
- 36.
Op. cit., p. 89.
- 37.
GOSPLAN, abbreviation of the Gosudarstvennyy Planovyy Komitet (State Planning Committee), a central board that supervised various aspects of the planned economy of the Soviet Union by translating into specific national plans the general economic objectives outlined by the Communist Party and the Government. Established in February 1921, GOSPLAN was originally an advisory council to the government, its functions limited to influencing the level and direction of state investments. It assumed a more comprehensive planning role in 1928, when the First Five-Year Plan, which called for rapid industrialisation and a drastic reduction of the private sector of the economy, was adopted. Until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, GOSPLAN’s role changed frequently to suit a variety of economic reorganisations.
- 38.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America (1933–1945).
- 39.
Op. cit. 30 January 1981.
- 40.
Evidence of actual change under Urukagina is indeed lacking (Wu 2005). Perhaps, it was even Urukagina who precipitated the end of the pre-Sargonic early dynastic III b era by allying with Sargon.
- 41.
God told Abraham to leave Mesopotamia and to his son Isaac, in Genesis 26:3 promised: “To you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath, which I swore to Abraham your father”. God then appeared at Bethel to Isaac’s son, Jacob (Genesis 28:13–15) and confirmed the covenant: “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth . . . and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go”. God confirmed it afresh with Moses.
- 42.
Some 300 million people work nowadays for governments around the world. In the OECD countries, the average public sector employment rate was 21.3 per cent of the total national workforce in 2013. As a percentage of the total population, World Bank data (2015) shows this to be 10 per cent for high-income countries (HIC), 6 per cent for middle-income countries (MIC), and 1 per cent for low-income countries (LIC). By Freedom House data , 9 per cent in free countries, 8 per cent in not free countries, and 5 per cent for partially free countries. By region, varying from 10.3 per cent in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to 1.6 per cent in South Asia, including a significant regional, income, and freedom variation too, in the size of state-owned enterprises (SOE).
- 43.
The chief boatman and head herdsman, fishery inspectors, grain tax supervisors, and temple administrators, along with those priests who had demanded excessive fees for performing religious rituals and for burying the dead.
- 44.
The World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risks Report highlighted its alarm about three “wicked problems”: climate change, mass migration, and cyber warfare.
- 45.
Most reforms in government fail. They do not fail because, once implemented, they yield unsatisfactory outcomes. The fail because they never get past the implementation stage at all. They are blocked outright or put into effect only in tokenistic, half-hearted fashion (Polidano 2001).
- 46.
In fact, they have placed more emphasis on how to govern efficiently, overlooking how to govern effectively.
- 47.
In New Zealand, a decision of the 2013 Government requires that the CEOs of state agencies steward the inter-generational interests of the country.
- 48.
As one confused public sector employee put it: “I know what my job is, and I want to do it as well as I can. Indeed, I would love my work if I could get one day’s peace to get on with it. But I am beset at every turn by unintelligible, time wasting and fruitless management initiatives, constant change, ill-judged targets, wrong-headed ‘commercial’ exemplars and continuous and misguided restructuring. I have to watch as, instead of my ‘customers’ – actually patients, pupils, taxpayers – getting a better deal from me, the only beneficiaries seem to be those who can lobby for special treatment”.
- 49.
The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, making choices inconsistent over time—people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.
- 50.
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualisation of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads”.
- 51.
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
- 52.
Every 10 percentage point increase in the penetration of broadband services is associated with an increase in per capita GDP of 1.38 percentage points; Internet and mobile phone penetration with a 1.12 and 0.81 percentage points increase, respectively (Minges 2015: 3).
- 53.
It is useful to consider how this Fourth Industrial Revolution —like its three predecessors—will alter government in three ways. First, it will change the information basis on which government is structured, the volume of information which government can absorb, and the variety of information on which can government rely. Second, it will change the capacity within government to analyse that information and to take decisions based on that analysis. As more complex and mature systems take advantage of this connectivity to tap into new capabilities, organisations must think about how these technologies combine to create value in new and different ways. The collection, analysis, and use of large volumes of data , introducing a complex and controversial set of issues: the privacy and security of citizen data . And, third, it will alter the potential and expected speed, reliability, and quality of government action based on those decisions and the government’s capacity to learn from its action. Hence, technology is inherently political, as is control of data , the analysis of data , and the use of data .
- 54.
The contribution of cities to the global economy and human development will therefore increase. Cities are already engines of economic growth, accounting for 70 per cent of global GDP and, while the world’s largest 150 metropolitan areas represent only 13.5 per cent of the global population, they account for over 40 per cent of global GDP.
- 55.
An event where a rare combination of circumstances aggravates a situation drastically.
- 56.
An uncontrolled or unpredictable factor.
- 57.
A difficult or impossible problem to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise.
- 58.
In 2015, the international community agreed on the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for the next 15 years. This highly ambitious “2030 Agenda” sets out 17 goals, 169 targets, and 231 indicators covering every aspect of development. The 2030 Agenda presents a radical new approach, focusing on the integrated pillars of Sustainable Development: economic, social, and environmental. It is universal, includes issues such as inequality and peace and security, democratic governance, tackling corruption , promoting participation, access to information, and other human rights and institutional capacity which were not part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) framework.
- 59.
In the longer term, it is estimated that two-thirds of children that are today in primary school will enter the world of work by taking jobs that have not yet been invented.
- 60.
By analogy to the role of the church as providing the administrative machinery of Europe in the Middle Ages.
- 61.
- 62.
The Washington Consensus was a set of 10 economic policies promoted as the “standard” reform package for developing countries, irrespective of local context, by the Washington, D.C., based international institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank .
- 63.
“From the border territory of Ningirsu to the waters of the sea … officials were present (everywhere)”.
- 64.
“From distant times, from when the seed (of life first) came forth … As the traditions were, it was”.
- 65.
The Northcote-Trevelyan Report was a document prepared by Stafford H. Northcote (later to be Chancellor of the Exchequer) and C. E. Trevelyan (then permanent secretary at the Treasury). Published in February 1854, the report catalysed the development of Her Majesty’s Civil Service in the United Kingdom.
- 66.
In his novel Little Dorrit written between 1855 and 1857 at the time of those reforms, Charles Dickens described the Civil Service as the “Circumlocution Office” to show that innovation was always crushed. One of the characters, in the novel, terms civil servants as “barnacles” and describes the reason for this thus: “in England …. An appointment in the Civil Service … confers neither status nor consideration … Here the Civil Servant is looked upon rather in the light of an outgrowth, to be tolerated because it cannot be shaken off” (Op. cit., the character Scoones, p. 349).
- 67.
Not for nothing is the French phrase “travailler pour le Roi de Prusse” still used to mean to work hard for a pittance.
- 68.
Theodore Roosevelt, in 1883, pointed out the hypocrisy behind much of the political demand in the United States for civil service reform supposedly in the name of increasing efficiency (Duties of American citizenship, 26 January 1883).
- 69.
- 70.
The study found that 83 per cent of those OECD countries facing fiscal austerity confront lower job satisfaction among public officials, and 84 per cent are witnessing increasing distrust in leadership . Yet, austerity is certainly not the only cause of malaise: 36 per cent of the non-austerity countries are also witnessing a decrease in workplace commitment in public service (58 per cent for the austerity countries); 21 per cent of the non-austerity countries observe a decrease of trust (73 per cent of the austerity countries); and a decrease of loyalty to the public service affects 14 per cent of the non-austerity countries (58 per cent of all austerity countries).
- 71.
Revelations as part of the recent WikiLeaks and FIFA scandals showed that governments and representatives of several OECD countries to be involved in corrupt activities.
- 72.
- 73.
“Best practice reform initiatives constrain local experimentation – while at the same time facilitating the perpetuation of dysfunction”. Local context is as or more important than general lessons from elsewhere (“best fit” not “best practice”).
- 74.
The fate of the Hanseatic League or of the great Renaissance entrepôts like Genoa or Venice suggests that great trading port cities become targets of international rivalries or national state-building ambitions. Goa and Macao were swept away by resurgent India and China , intolerant of colonial era quirks. Most of Europe’s surviving city-states like San Marino, Andorra, Mount Athos, or Lichtenstein are mountain redoubts. Monaco’s blockade by France in 1962–1963 prefigured today’s concerns over tax havens, mostly island vestiges of empire like the Caymans or British Virgin Islands, where international investors benefit from the security of high-quality “rule of law ” and administrative institutions without having to pay the tax to secure them.
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Everest-Phillips, M. (2019). Lessons from Lagash: Public Service at the Start of History and Now. In: Baimenov, A., Liverakos, P. (eds) Public Service Excellence in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3215-9_3
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