Vol. 4 No. 2 (2019): 12th issue
Dear Reader,
We are pleased to present you with the 12th issue of the International Journal of Civil Service Reform and Practice published by the Astana Civil Service Hub.
This issue opens with the article of Dr Mergen Dyussenov, Head of the Research Centre for Studies on Anti-Corruption issues and lecturer at the Academy of Public Administration in Kazakhstan. The paper, using an actor-centric approach to study agenda-setting interactions, seeks to fill a gap in the existing policy research by introducing a new concept of government resilience. This new concept is based on the assumption that governments have sufficient capacity and motivation to withstand external pressures in the context of highly contested agenda-setting interactions among advocacy groups or ‘policy entrepreneurs’. Furthermore, the new framework is applied to assess the degree of government resilience across two Central Asian nations – Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – with regard to economic diversification policies.
The next paper – prepared by Mohammad Sahadat Hossain and his colleagues at the UNDP implemented Access to Information (a2i) Programme in Bangladesh – presents the results of using a new online and off-line based application named as Krisoker Digital Thikana (Farmer’s Digital Platform). This application aims to provide different agriculture-related services to farmers. In their paper the authors use quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the newly introduced application from the Time, Cost and Visit (TCV) perspective and compare it to the conventional agriculture-related services modality providing similar services to farmers.
This issue concludes with a book review prepared by Dr Colin Knox, Professor at Nazarbayev and Ulster Universities, on the book titled “Public Service Excellence in the 21st Century”, edited by Alikhan Baimenov and Panos Liverakos and published recently by the Palgrave Macmillan Publishing House. In his review Dr Colin Knox is of the opinion that this book is bridging a divide between academia and practitioners through a series of chapters dealing with several topics that are pertinent to public service development in the 21st Century. Furthermore, he suggests that the country focused chapters on China, South Korea, Japan and some of the post-Soviet Republics offer some interesting knowledge to Western readers, who cannot always access such work due to the language barrier.
We hope that the content of this issue of the Journal will be of value to scholars, practitioners and other readers interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of the topics considered by the above authors.
Yours sincerely,
The Editorial Team
