Bureaucracy as Assemblage
Civil Service Reform, Administrative Legacies and the Politics of Informalization in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19229175 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stylianos Moshona (0000-0003-2781-244X), Tom De Herdt (0000-0002-5288-7446), Kristof Titeca (0000-0003-2003-2053) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Development and Change (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0012-155X • E-ISSN: 1467-7660 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/dech.70069 |
| OpenAlex | W7161536093 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
In its own evaluation of the civil service reform project that took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2014 and 2021, the World Bank concluded that the project was ‘moderately unsatisfactory’. It explained this characterization by referring to complex political dynamics, including a waning political will at the highest level. Built on a conceptualization of the Congolese administration as a socially and historically situated assemblage, this analysis of the reform foregrounds the role of administrative legacies. Both object and subject of the reform, the practices that allowed the administration to survive decades of fiscal collapse — the informalization of civil service employment and pay — proved pivotal. Far from simply failing to respond to external reform pressures, the administration repurposed and refracted reform initiatives according to its own entrenched logics (clientelist recruitment, reliance on salary supplements and the pursuit of positional security), with uneven and contradictory effects. Viewed from this angle, a more nuanced picture of reform outcomes emerges, which acknowledges the multiplicity of interests and responsibilities involved in the design and implementation of the reform, including those of the World Bank, whose tacit acquiescence of implementation dynamics may have further deepened informalization patterns
Acquiescence · Administration (probate law) · Bureaucracy · Civil society · Clientelism · Conceptualization · Democracy · Politics · Global and Cross-Cultural Management · Management and Organizational Studies · Public Policy and Administration Research
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Identity Economics
The World Bank and Africa
Development Aid Confronts Politics
Development Beyond Neoliberalism?
Looting Africa
Feeding the Horse
Construire des bureaucraties wébériennes à l'ère du New Public Management
Sabotaging Civil Service Reform in Aid-Dependent Countries
Public Service Provision in a Failed State
Paying health workers for performance in a fragmented, fragile state
New’ approaches confront ‘old’ challenges in African public sector reform
Economic faith, Social project and a misreading of African society
Development anthropology and social engineering
Wageless Life
Bureaucratic fragmentation by design? the case of payroll management in the democratic Republic of Congo
The volatility of a half-cooked bouillabaisse
Incertitude, autonomie et parasitisme
Redesigning African civil service reforms
Governance with Empty Pockets
The politics of civil service reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Confronting Leaders at the Apex of the State
Misguided and Misdiagnosed
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |