A commitment to professional reform: an administrative history of executive development and training in the Singapore Public Service, 1959 to 2001

Abstract

The Singapore Public Service, acknowledged internationally as highly-efficient and one of the least corrupt in the world, has often been overlooked by literature. Yet, the strategic vision and political leadership of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party government, often attributed for Singapore’s success, still needed to be translated into practicable policies and implemented into programmes by the bureaucracy. A comprehensive examination into the role of the bureaucracy in Singapore’s modernisation is beyond the constraints of this doctoral thesis. This study, using archival research and oral interviews to construct an administrative history of executive development and training in the Singapore Public Service, plugs a gap in the literature and lays the foundation for a future holistic examination of the Singapore bureaucracy. This thesis argues that the Singapore Public Service used executive development training and as a medium of change to introduce reforms across the bureaucracy. In so doing, the bureaucracy was able to constantly adjust itself to help modernise Singapore. In the 40 years between decolonisation in 1959 and 2001, when the training arm of the Singapore bureaucracy became a statutory board, training and development had been used firstly, to socialise the bureaucracy away from its colonial-era organisational culture to prepare it for the tasks of state-formation and nation-building. Subsequently, civil servants were mobilised, through training and development, into an ‘economic general staff’ to lead the Singapore developmental state in the 1970s and 1980s. The modus operandi in all this was to prioritise the training of the bureaucracy’s leadership corps, to groom an élite Praetorian Guard, who would then disseminate reforms across the bureaucracy. The Public Service for the 21st Century reforms in the 1990s was the epitome in harnessing development and training for reforms across the bureaucracy. The study concludes, not be asserting a template for replication but, offering points of reference for bureaucracies aspiring reforms. The thesis is not an end in itself but offers a basis to start a conversation on scholarship in the fields of history, public administration and Singapore.