Analysis of the Egyptian Model of Public Administration Reform Policies

Starting in the 1950s and continuing up to the present, this study aims to analyze the characteristics and dynamics of Egypt's public administration reform, taking this understanding as a trajectory paradigm for ongoing endeavors in public administration reform policies.
Public administration reform policies can be evaluated from a variety of perspectives and approaches across different time-based settings, emphasizing numerous trends in administrative reform and the need to shift from focusing on bureaucrats and the government machinery towards a focus on the people, and how to increase the level of quality of the public services that are provided to the citizens. In that, and over the past seven decades, the Egyptian government has persistently tried to reform its public administration. The different reform efforts have steadily been shaped by the country's different political visions, economic approach, and societal demands.
Given the reforms in public administration have adopted several distinct theoretical models, this study reviews Egypt's efforts to reform its public administration by mapping them against theoretical public administration reform approaches.
This study employs a "qualitative descriptive methodology" to track Egypt's administrative reform policies in terms of Legislative; Structural and Organizational; and Institutional Dynamics, Patterns, and Manifestations, distinguishing Egypt's administrative reform efforts since the 1950's into four phases: Centralized Weberian Public Administration (CWPA) phase from 1952 to 1970; followed by the De-Centralized Weberian Public Administration (DWPA) phase from 1971 to 1981; into the Modernization via New Public Management (NPM) phase from 1982 to 2014; reaching the New wave of reform towards a Neo Weberian State (NWS) phase from 2014-till present.
The paper originates a "systematic framework" for categorizing administrative reform in Egypt, where the management orientation and system arrangements of different phases are classified in relation to the tenets of three public administration reform models: Weberian Bureaucracy; New Public Management; and Neo-Weberian State Model (NWS).
According to analysis of the case of Egypt, the policy instruments utilized to attain reform objectives are primarily legislative; structural; and institutional, but they also rely on improving communication modes and manifestations that stress citizen centricity.
This finding is consistent with the assumptions and trajectories of the "NWS" model and hence provides theoretical and practical implications for putting reform programs into action through "active state participation" and "bureaucratic strengthening."