PUBLIC PROCUREMENT: Administrative Disruption of the Policy Process in Africa

The public policy that envisions appropriate health, education, and welfare systems is disrupted once budgeting of these systems imposes forms of operation that rely on contracting non-governmental operators of services and employers. Public procurement, governments’ competitive purchase of goods and services, generated mixed welfare systems budgeting public, state-owned operators, as well as non-governmental, profit, and non-profit oriented operators. Indicators of deteriorating quality of services, as well as lowering levels of job quality in contracted health, education, and welfare services, require an understanding of the ways in which public procurement serves as an administrative disruption of policy processes in Africa. Focusing on Africa directs our investigation of public procurement as disruptive under two conditions: firstly, non-governmental bodies are involved in the arrival and distribution to the right awaiting recipients. Secondly, in Africa, politics is as important as economics and law in understanding how the forces behind market-based reform operate and transform the public sector and the provision of goods and services. In this context, I develop the notion of administrative policy disruption as promoting three problematic processes: violating citizens’ rights to quality services, reinforcing anti-democratic practices, and weakening employees’ options to struggle to improve the quality of their jobs. By developing this notion, I aim to underline the extent to which public policy that envisions appropriate health, education, and welfare systems is disrupted once forms of contract-based operation that rely on stingy public budgeting are imposed on them.