DR Congo: The case for taking the administration seriously

Introduction: Stylianos Moshonas, Tom De Herdt and Kristof Titeca explore the challenges facing the DR Congo civil service. The Congolese administration in its current state has long been pointed to as a major impediment to Congo's ambition to achieve developmental outcomes: threadbare on the service delivery front, inefficient, excessive in urban settings, and corrupt - indeed indicative of the state's predatory nature. In a sense, the civil service has come a long way: the outbreak of war in the 1990s came atop decades of economic crisis, structural adjustment, and state decline, and meant that in 2001 - when donors re-engaged with the country after ten years of absence - administrative capacity was very emaciated. Since then, though, a wide array of (mostly donor-promoted) structural reforms have been unrolled in the DRC. However, when one looks at international engagement, an interesting paradox has surrounded the civil service in Congo, which has occupied a singularly ambiguous position. Even though international actors in Congo have never ceased stressing 'state redress', 'restoring the authority of the state', and 'state reconstruction', while pumping vast sums of aid into service delivery - particularly in health and education - the area of civil service and administrative reform has been largely neglected. In 2003, a timid reformwas initiated with the participation of several donors, but proved inconclusive, wasteful, and sidetracked; most donors had withdrawn by 2010.