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The ambiguity of bureaucracy.

Article Excerpt
Is bureaucracy a vital institution that has to be built up by poor countries in pursuit of economic development? Or is it, on the contrary, an institution that persistently threatens, like a fast-growing riverweed, to choke the channels of public administration? To understand the ambiguity of bureaucracy, we need to distinguish between the abstract and the concrete senses of 'bureaucracy'. It is abstract bureaucracy that bears the negative connotation, while the concrete noun--bureaucracy, synonymous with an organized civil service--does not necessarily do so. This distinction allows us to imagine that the essential policy problem for poor countries is to design a non-bureaucratic bureaucracy. Before jumping to this conclusion, however, we need to look more closely at what is wrong with bureaucracy in the abstract sense.

Those who use 'bureaucracy' as a term of abuse are probably making one or more of five different complaints. The first of these complaints is that officials are accountable only to their superiors in the hierarchy, and not to those whose affairs they administer. Officials are empowered first of all by the prevailing laws, but then, under the law, by their superiors delegating powers and duties to them. This implies no accountability to the governed.

The second...

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