We end a year in which more people across the world have participated in elections than ever before. Faced with complex global and domestic challenges, political leaders new and old are looking to their civil services to help develop and implement reforms to deliver better outcomes for their citizens, including here in the UK, where prime minister Keir Starmer is looking for a “decade of national renewal”.
These expectations create both intense pressures and exciting possibilities for public administrators – not least the golden opportunity to seek out and learn from good practice.
As Leo Yip, head of the Singaporean Public Service has said, even though we operate in different countries with different systems of governance, civil servants are all in the same profession and have the common aim of solving largely similar challenges and improving the lives of our peoples. "It is therefore all the more important that we learn from one another,” he says.
The Blavatnik Index of Public Administration, launched last week at Oxford University, aims to support civil service leaders around the world to do just that. Building on the 2017 and 2019 International Civil Service Effectiveness Index, initiated by former cabinet secretary Lord Jeremy Heywood, this refreshed index brings together the best available data on the performance of public administrations in 120 countries. It looks at four overarching domains of an effective civil service – strategy and leadership; public policy; national delivery; and underpinning people and processes.
Singapore tops the index, followed closely by Norway, Canada, Denmark and Finland. The UK is joint sixth with New Zealand. Whilst dominated by Western Europe, the list's "top 25” includes countries from across five continents. Similarly, whilst high-income countries tend to rank more highly, the leading nations in other income groups (including Brazil, Ukraine and Rwanda) are largely equal with the lower and middle performers of the higher income groups, showing there is good practice to be shared across regions and income groups.
"The UK civil service may be able to learn from the experience of peers on developing cross-government digital infrastructure and increasing the use of data in policymaking"
The UK government may take confidence from the relative strength of the UK civil service in policymaking and system oversight. The index also suggests that ministers and civil service leaders are right to prioritise improving data and digital services. The UK civil service ranks less highly on these themes and may be able to learn from the experience of peer countries, for example on developing cross-government digital infrastructure and increasing the use of data in policymaking.
A new Blavatnik Index website offers an opportunity to explore our data more fully and use interactive tools to compare performance. The Index of Public Administration does not, however, provide a definitive picture of performance. Limitations in the data can lead to apparent anomalies. Extending the index country coverage to 120 has meant not including otherwise eligible data sources that only cover a sub-set of countries. Practitioners will therefore want to triangulate the comparisons with their own domestic data and experience and use the interactive tools to seek out the most relevant comparators.
At the Blavatnik School, we’ll be aiming to work with governments and international bodies to support efforts to improve public administration data and conduct further research and analysis such as the production of regional-level indices.
But the real value of the Blavatnik Index is in the conversations between civil services that it starts and the peer learning it supports. Lord Gus O’Donnell, former UK cabinet secretary and chair of the project’s senior leadership panel, says the Blavatnik Index is a valuable tool for the current generation of public-administration leaders to better understand and monitor how their administration compares globally.
He hopes it encourages leaders to engage with their peers to share best practice from their country and to learn from others. I hope readers of Civil Service World will also be inspired to join this conversation.
Kathy Hall is chief operating officer at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government