Understanding the political economy of Congo's civil service remunerations and recruitment system.

Despite an emphasis on strengthening the capacity of the public sector as a key policy component of the state-building approach in fragile states, the issue of public sector remunerations has received little attention. This empirical gap extends beyond the policy realm, as the scholarship dealing with African public governance has also remained silent on this issue. Addressing both gaps, this project explores the functioning of the Democratic Republic of Congo's wage bill and payroll system through an analytical framework building on the ethnographic tradition in the study of 'real governance' and 'negotiated statehood', applied to the back office bureaucracy of the central administration. We will focus on analysing the politics behind the allocation and (re)distribution of the wage bill in the DRC, particularly the system of public sector remunerations, both in terms of its composition and its sources. We concentrate on the degrees of differentiation across ministries, departments in five ministries targeted by civil service reform, while also examining the intersection of remunerations with ongoing policy reforms. In so doing, we address the empirical gap within the literature on African governance by providing an in-depth exploration of the system of public sector remunerations and recruitment processes in Congo's central bureaucracy, while also providing insights on the development implications that this system carries for international actors.

Keywords:CONGO

Disciplines:Development planning and policy, Anthropology of economy and development, Political and legal anthropology, Public administration organisations, Public management

Project type:Collaboration project