Challenges and opportunities in the development of human capital in the Dominican Republic's public administration system

Abstract

State reform is one of the most important topics on the agenda of development agencies. The goal of this reform is to improve institutional effectiveness and hence the well being of citizens. The processes of reform require that public agencies and their personnel develop the capacity to respond in an efficient and effective manner to citizen's needs.

However, the long legacy of centralist, authoritative and corrupt governments in Latin America, and the Dominican Republic in particular, continue to threaten the processes of State reform. In this paper, I discuss an important step that the Dominican government took in 1991 to support the processes of reform, the enactment of the law of civil service and public administration career, and subsequent efforts to implement this law. As will be discussed here, the implementation of the law has been difficult for several reasons. These include issues of capacity within the agency in charge of implementing the law, large numbers of public servants in positions for which they don't have the skills required to perform their duties.

Adding to these problems is the fact that there is only one program of graduate instruction in public administration in the entire country. One of the solutions that have been put forth to address these issues is that universities need to be engaged in supporting the process of reform. In particular, they have a role in providing the human capital with the necessary skills for responding to the reform needs of the country.

In that context, I will discuss here how the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (the UASD), the oldest and largest public university in the Dominican Republic, is attempting to address these needs. I discuss how the UASD formed a partnership with a public university in the United States, Utah State University (USU) and other public institutions in the Dominican Republic to create institutional capacity in the country in order to support the processes of reform. The partnership's activities are funded by a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Association Liaison Office for University Cooperation in Development (ALO).