Academic literature on the topic 'Bureaucracy Sri Lanka'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the New Public Financial Management concept and the contingency model approach to an analysis of the determinants of the accrual-based International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) adoption process as a financial management reform in Sri Lanka, a developing country in Asia. Design/methodology/approach Based on the prior literature, this paper develops a framework to highlight the importance of accrual-based reforms in public sector accounting policies to enable better transparency and accountability. It shows the extent to which Sri Lankan public sector institutions have adopted IPSAS-based accounting standards and the limitations of adopting these standards in a developing country, using documentary analysis. Findings In developing countries, the public sector faces practical problems when adopting reforms due to limited institutional capacity, high political involvement and bureaucracy in decision making. This paper concludes that significant policy changes towards the adoption of international accounting standards have gained momentum over the last decade in Sri Lanka while the much larger economies in Asia are still studying this process. However, the prevailing political uncertainty in Sri Lanka has negatively impacted the implementation process. Originality/value Relatively little is known about the diffusion of, and the difficulties in, implementing accrual-based IPSAS in the Asian region. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by exploring the Sri Lankan experience. This could be applied by other developing countries in Asia, including the high-growth nations, for policy adoption and accounting harmonisation.

India perceives the entire Indian Ocean region (IOR) as its strategic backyard and regards itself as a “security provider” in the region. This view, of course, is not shared by many, mainly by the Chinese who often state “the Indian Ocean is not India’s backyard.” To reinforce its own perceptions and stem its eroding influence in the region - India has stepped up its efforts in enhancing its relations in general and on maritime security in particular with its island neighbours, an aspect that is being extended to the entire South Asian neighbourhood incrementally. The importance of the Mahanian concept of utilising Sea Power for the achievement of national objectives has led to the realisation amongst a normally ‘sea blind’ Indian bureaucracy to become more proactive. This article explores the maritime policy of India with regard to its neighbouring littoral states in the Indian Ocean.

AbstractFeeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were “made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.

The Government Agent (GA) represented the highest authority of the district Administration in the pre-independent Sri Lanka. A similar position known as the “Disawe” could be found in the local administration in the kandyan kingdom. The post of the disawe was replaced by the colonial post of the GA. The powers and functions of the GA made him a petty king in the district. The GA commanded his duty centering in his official place known as Kachchery. The beginning of the 20th Century, the GA played a significant role in district administration in Sri Lanka. Despoil of power and functions of the GA by the political authority were accelerated with the introduction of the Provincial Council system in 1987. Presently the GA is not other than a government servant who plays a role of a coordinator. Also GA has become a victim of the rapid process of politicization of bureaucracy.

This paper presents a set of lessons learned from the adoption of an e-Government initiative in Sri Lanka. The case study presented in the paper is the e-Pensions project of the e-government initiative of the Government of Sri Lanka called “e-SriLanka”. This is one of the first World Bank projects designed to bring Information Communication Technology (ICT) to every village, citizen, and business, and transform the way the government thinks and works. A set of lessons related to leadership, hidden cost, BPR, group dynamics, data migration, language issues, bureaucracy, training, change management, project governance, staff turnover and transitional projects were identified. While some of these lessons have been identified in the previous literature five such lessons have not been discussed previously. Those are transitional projects, language issues relating to software development processes, group dynamics, planning for data migration and staff turnover. Moreover, the study further revealed some interrelationship among these factors eg., how transitional projects can positively impact training and change management. Thus, these new insights relating to e-Government adoptions will shed some light into new e-government initiatives in developing countries with similar environments to Sri Lanka. Additionally, these new factors will contribute to enhancing e-Government adoption models.

Due to the weaknesses of Traditional Budgeting and Better Budgeting, budgeting moved to its third wave called Beyond Budgeting. Beyond Budgeting is an alter­native, coherent management model that enables companies to manage performance through processes spe­cifically tailored to suit today’s volatile market. Although, researchers have explained how organisations should move to Beyond Budgeting they have not discussed as to why some organisations are lagging behind in terms of Beyond Budgeting implementation. Therefore, this study intends to address and bridge the above research gap. Specifically, the study investigates how far the existing organizational set-ups support an advanced model called Beyond Budgeting and explores why can or cannot these organisations move to Beyond Budgeting. The study carries out a multiple case study approach because it provides an in-depth analysis of budgetary processes of four reputed Sri Lankan companies. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and documentation reviews where data triangulation was used to validate the data. Based on the findings the study concluded that in the existing organizational set-ups, leadership principles of Beyond Budgeting were strongly present compared to process principles. It was also found that complications in setting rolling forecasts, bureaucracy, lack of virtues, dependency culture on budgets to evaluate performance, perceiving dynamic goals as too ambiguous to set and lack of competitor intelligence as main barriers of moving to Beyond Budgeting concept.

This thesis explores the everyday practices, relationships and interactions in a Probation Unit of the Department of Probation and Child Care Services in the Central Province in Sri Lanka. Using multi-sited ethnography and the ethnographer’s own experiences in this sector it examines how frontline workers at the Probation Unit engage and draw upon international and national development discourse, ideas and theories of children and childhood to engage with colleagues and clients. This thesis takes as its analytical starting point that state agencies are sites where global development discourse meets local practices. Simultaneously, they are sites where ideas and practices of nationalism, class, morality and professional identity are produced and reproduced. State sector employment is an important source of social mobility, gaining respectability and constructing a middle class identity. Thus, maintaining the ‘in-between’ position in relation to the upper and lower classes is an especially anxiety-ridden and challenging process for state bureaucrats. This shapes the particular characteristics of their nationalism, morality and professional identity and influences the way in which they translate policies and engage with institutional and bureaucratic procedures. This thesis examines this process in detail and illustrates its translocal nature. More explicitly it looks at the ways in which development discourse and practice is transformed by the forms of sociality that it engenders. The ethnography illustrates that this process allows for development policies and interventions to be co-opted in particular ways that articulate ideas and practices of nationalism, class, morality and professional identity. Through this cooption, the outcomes of development policies and interventions are transformed in unanticipated ways. The broader social and political process that transforms development policies and practices remains only partially visible to development projects and programmes. The complexity and in particular the historicity of social and political contexts remains outside development project logic and timelines. To understand the relationship between policy and practice or to evaluate development outcomes is meaningless if development is conceptualised as something that stands apart from society. What is most useful to understand, and indeed revealing, is how actors make meaning of development policies and programmes as part of everyday practices in historically situated social and political contexts. The thesis concludes that theorising, analysing or even critiquing development’s transformative potential is misleading as it fails to recognise that what is being transformed is development itself.

Management theories and practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries encourage elected and public officials to work together constructively during the policymaking and policy implementation process. However, within this process, the 'on-the-ground' relationships that develop between elected and public officials tend to span the spectrum from independent through to interdependent interactions. This thesis reveals that the nature of their relationship has profound effects on policy outcomes, in this case on poverty reduction policies in Sri Lanka. The findings show that the parties involved have a dynamic relationship that develops, over time, in response to tit-for-tat behaviours on the part of each-group behaviours that can be either trust-building or trust-destroying. A central part of this process is the exercise of discretion in the policymaking and policy implementation stages of poverty reduction policy in Sri Lanka. The thesis investigates how bureaucratic power is exercised in the two policy stages of Sri Lanka's poverty reduction policy, questioning how bureaucratic power affects the policy process. In order to reveal the potential influence of bureaucratic power and bureaucratic capacity to enact discretionary power during policymaking and policy implementation, the thesis examines the relationship between elected and public officials, the bureaucratic capacity to exercise discretion in the face of political control and the political capacity to control bureaucratic discretion. It also explores whether such interactions facilitate or interrupt the end purposes of poverty reduction depending on the degree of trust developed between the parties. An investigation of the outcomes of poverty reduction policies in Sri Lanka reveals that there is considerable variability in outcomes, with some geographic regions in the country considered to be high-performing and others low-performing. Implementation of poverty-related policies such as health policy and education policy has shown high performance within metropolitan areas; however, specific poverty reduction policies have not shown similar levels of performance in metropolitan areas. Therefore, a primary aim of this study is to investigate to what extent the level of performance in terms of outcomes is dependent on managerial capacity and functional capability of senior public officials, as well as the nature of the relationship that develops between these parties in the policy process. The key finding of this thesis is that the diverse relationships between elected and public officials are central to the dynamics of the policy process. While the exercise of discretion has been used as a strategy both to overcome the difficulties that elected and public officials face and to build trust, it can also destroy the trust between elected and public officials. The study shows that Sri Lankan policymakers need to address the constructive rather than disruptive aspects of the exercise of discretionary power, because discretion can be used for building trust between elected and public officials during the policy process in order to accomplish policy goals.