First of a three-part series on redesigning Pakistan’s civil service.
Pakistan will have nearly 325 million people by 2040. Governing a country of that size, increasingly urban, connected, technologically aware and economically complex will require capabilities very different from those needed, when Pakistan inherited its administrative machinery in 1947. Yet the basic architecture of our higher civil service remains remarkably familiar: recruit some of the country's brightest young people through one competitive examination, allocate them among occupational groups, rotate generalists through widely different assignments, promote substantially through seniority, and evaluate performance through confidential annual reports. The problem is not the quality of the people entering the civil service. Many are exceptionally capable. The problem is the system into which we place them. Pakistan's civil service does not need another round of incremental reform. It needs redesign.
The starting point should be relevance. The competitive examination need not disappear, nor do the constitutional principles of open competition and regional representation need to be disturbed. What must change is the assumption that candidates can first be selected through a common process and only afterwards allocated to professions in which they may have little academic background or previous expertise.
Imagine the competitive examination being conducted in one enormous hall, but with separate sections representing the principal professional streams of government. The examination process remains broadly common, but a candidate can enter a particular stream only if he or she meets the academic and professional criteria prescribed for that field. A candidate competing for information, for example, should come with qualifications relevant to mass communication and media studies. Relevance becomes the first criterion for entry rather than something government hopes an officer will acquire afterwards.
The objective, therefore, is not another change in nomenclature. It is to change the organizing principle of Pakistan's higher civil service: from allocation to relevance, from rotation to specialization, and from generalist dominance to professional leadership.
Once an officer enters a professional stream, that profession should become a career. Training, continuing professional education and work experience should progressively deepen expertise. Management and leadership training should simultaneously prepare officers to run increasingly complex departments. As they rise, structured exposure to other streams, without leaving their parent department, should broaden their understanding. The objective is specialization without silos.
This is where the proposed model differs fundamentally from the National Executive Service (NES) model, a proposal under review by the government. The principal NES proposal does not replace PAS or the existing occupational groups. PAS would remain an All Pakistan Service, while a new NES would draw selected officers from across government and potentially professionals from outside, into a senior cadre for key Grade 20–22 positions. Its proponents rightly seek to open senior leadership beyond PAS and introduce competition at the top. But why preserve the generalist structure that needs reform and then create another supra-service above it? Instead of reducing bureaucratic layers, the proposal risks adding another one.
International experience does not point to a single model. France has created an interministerial Corps of State Administrators, attached to the Prime Minister, but the comparison with NES is important: France simultaneously placed 15 pre-existing senior administrative corps into extinction for new recruitment and consolidated them into the new common corps. France therefore chose consolidation rather than simply adding another senior cadre on top of the old structure. The United Kingdom, Australia and Canada take a different route, allowing senior professionals to compete for positions outside their parent departments where they meet the requirements of the particular position. Pakistan is not yet ready for that transition. Until employment itself moves towards position-based recruitment, professional streams should remain vertical throughout an officer's career.
That does not mean producing narrow specialists incapable of running government. Senior officers should be equipped to run departments, advise ministers, coordinate across government and translate policy into implementation. Seniority should broaden an officer's capabilities without severing the officer from his or her professional stream. There is also a more fundamental reason why coordination should not be entrusted to a supra-service. Civil servants must stop assuming that policymaking is their role; elected representatives must stop assuming that policymaking is the job of civil servants. In a democracy, policy belongs to the people through their elected representatives. Civil servants provide professional advice and institutional knowledge, and then implement the policies elected governments decide upon.
Finance, commerce, industry, energy, health and education will inevitably intersect. Their professional civil servants must work together, but it is principally the cabinet that must reconcile competing priorities and determine national policy. A permanent bureaucracy should provide institutional continuity, but continuity must not become control. The objective, therefore, is not another change in nomenclature. It is to change the organizing principle of Pakistan's higher civil service: from allocation to relevance, from rotation to specialization, and from generalist dominance to professional leadership.
To be continued