Image: Speaker’s education qualification sage is making SM waves but NPP is silent!
Effective communication plays a vital role in governance. If communication is clear and effective, it contributes to promoting transparency and building trust between those holding power and the people who are being served. It helps citizens to better understand the policies and decisions of governments, thus fostering a sense of accountability. For any government to function smoothly and efficiently and make decisions so that everyone benefits, the trust of its citizens is essential. In that sense, effective communication is not simply a good idea but an essential building block for efficacious good governance.
This piece is an outcome of our recent communication experiences with some bureaucrats and political authorities of the new NPP government. During the last few decades, it was mostly, and extremely difficult to get even acknowledgement of correspondence and communication, even from the Presidential Secretariat in Sri Lanka. For those living overseas, acknowledging a communication, and receiving a response regarding the action taken is assured through various guidelines, codes of conduct, and service charters applicable to public servants. There are certain timelines imposed on public servants to comply with those benchmarks.
Background
In 2016, as Committee members of the Australian Advocacy for Good Governance in Sri Lanka (AAGGSL), the late Mr. Sarath Jayasuriya and I wrote a letter to the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe about the necessity to make the Sri Lankan Public Service more responsive, efficient and effective to citizens’ requests, and the need for more transparency in how they handle such requests. We made certain submissions to make this happen. It fell on deaf ears, even without an acknowledgement. As a graduate of the Postgraduate Institute of Management in Sri Lanka, I even sought their assistance, at least to develop this as a research project for their MPA students. Over time, they also did not respond.
Both Sarath and I like many others have had extremely negative experiences in dealing with the Sri Lankan Public Service. Everything depended on whom one knows, and one’s ability to throw money to get something done. As a work and method study specialist, I had some ideas as to the way the services delivered by public service institutions to the general public could be improved. We requested the government to allow us to use one of the districts in Sri Lanka to run our proposal as a pilot project. Even Mr Jayasuriya, who had strong links with the United National Party and its leader, became disillusioned by the apparent indifferent attitude they had adopted.
Private and public administration
Communication is a key lever in both the private and public sectors. It is necessary to increase managerial efficiency and to establish communal or industrial peace through cooperation. It helps coordination between diverse entities. An effective communication strategy benefits a business while a poor strategy can damage its reputation and profits. All forms of communication emanating from Public Administration are communication with the public and therefore must maintain objectivity.
While private administration is not always accountable to the general public, a public administration is accountable to the state via parliament and ultimately to the citizenry. A private organisation also has certain responsibilities to people and society, though the nature and extent of such responsibilities are less apparent. Preferential treatment acquires prominence in the private sector where uniformity in treatment, inclusivity, consultation, and participation may not be the standard mode of operation.
In the private sector, resorting to unethical practices to maximize profits is hardly questioned and usually rewarded. However, in the public sector, employees have limited freedoms, as the rule of law should dominate all practices. The wish and decision of the highest authority in the entity holds and remains final. On the other hand, public administration is generally required to avoid preferential treatment.
Public administration further differs in that it echoes the political character of the government it serves. A change of government has an impact on the way public administration performs. Usually, administrators in public service are picked through a strict set of selection criteria, though exceptions to this practice are becoming more and more common. Such practices have their advantages and disadvantages. This can be seen as an inevitable outcome of the global expansion of neo-liberal tendencies and populist politics.
The primary purpose of public service is, as the name implies, to serve people’s interests and provide for public welfare, not profits. Nevertheless, certain organisations established under state control such as corporations and authorities may make profits while complimenting the service they provide to society.
Role of Communication
The role of communication is of vital importance in demonstrating the capability, accountability, transparency, and responsiveness of a government to the needs of the general public, especially, when it is a new government. In order that the people’s voices may be heard and the citizenry to hold the government accountable, the creation of both formal and informal communication channels with the people is essential. However, establishing such communication channels is not enough unless those channels are effective and staffed by efficient and effective communicators. Of course, at times, this carries the risk of certain quick decision-making processes. This involves the need for negating formal rules and procedures of communication.
At certain times, informal methods of communication may lead to better success in managing relationships with people, though this could only be a temporary initial arrangement. In all instances, however, communication channels need to be effective and efficient, with formal feedback mechanisms to improve service delivery. Also, effective communication assists and promotes good governance. For that to happen, an inclusive public space based on informed dialogue and debate is necessary.
Communication can also be dishonestly used to promote poor governance. Instead of providing a voice for the people, some communicators will do everything to safeguard the interests of those who hold political power.
On the positive side, we can take the example of Bosnia where communication channels including social media helped generate public pressure against state corruption. In India, e-government initiatives, such as e-procurement helped reduce corruption and improve state capacity. For instance, citizens took part in civic activism using citizen score cards, with the involvement of local authorities.
The case of Sri Lanka
In Sri Lanka, people are expecting similar outcomes in the fight against corruption through legislative means to help improve government capacity, accountability, and transparency. However, the new government is tested every day as to what it does in overcoming the challenges of dealing with short-term expectations and addressing the day-to-day issues that ought to be addressed. There have been many opinions expressed by people who alleged to have had not-so-positive experiences in communicating with the officials and political authorities.
Keeping effective communication will assist citizens in influencing the decision-making processes of the new government by expressing their legitimate demands. Also, maintaining a dynamic civil society will enable a government to find out whether a new measure the government has adopted is effective or not. It will also help decide where the monies need to be allocated and whether those monies have reached the intended targets. To achieve this means developing a system of good governance where mechanisms for holding the government to account are established and implemented, and the government is responsive.
In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digitalization of industry and services, and the use of emerging technologies have made communication easily accessible and effective. Every organisation functions by continuously communicating information, views, and opinions of everybody in the organisation through feedback loops, thus helping to overcome barriers among diverse parts of any organisation united in their thinking.
Building relationships
Communication is about building relationships between people, both functional and personal. The functional aspect cannot work successfully without the personal aspect. A system of public administration is key to the whole political system as it is intertwined and entangled in the existing political system.
At the same time, public administration is extremely complex, and its communication system is one of the main pillars of democracy. If it breaks down it will create fissures in the democratic system, thus leading it to collapse. In a globalised system that exists today, a few multinational conglomerates control economies and industrial systems all over the world. Influenced by these conglomerates, a few superpowers control world politics, the economy, and other important aspects of people’s lives. It is, therefore, essential that communication systems do not collapse.
Effective communication in Public Administration also contributes to creating good governance, i.e., integrity, honesty, transparency, etc. For example, in Italy, the public administrations must make their actions transparent to the public. This helps citizens understand what governments are doing and enables them to exercise their rights as citizens. Furthermore, promoting the digital transformation of a country requires a medium-term information technology plan. It requires research and analysis, defining key performance indicators that are clear, specific, achievable, and measurable to understand if the communication has been effective.
Australia adopts a method for providing clear, correct, comprehensive, and concise communication so it is easy for any of its citizens to understand. Public communication is considered an essential component of public policymaking and public administration.
In the age of social media and misinformation, there is a strong need for proactive communication from political authorities and public administrators at all levels of government. They have a responsibility to directly communicate their decisions and actions to relevant stakeholders, and address any of their questions or concerns. The aim is to ensure public opinion is shaped by factual, truthful information. Hence, every public administrator needs to possess basic communication skills and the ability to develop communication strategies or plans to get the word out of their programs.
Need for strong communication
If the government considers building a more informed, engaged, and accountable society is essential, then it should prioritize clear, straightforward, and effective communication. In the new government, the same old issues in communication are quite apparent. Most of the access points for purposes of communication appear to be either inactive, ineffective, or closed. Unless those issues are resolved soon it will not allow people, both local and diaspora, to actively participate in the democratic process. In a crisis, which is more probable than not, a lack of effective communication will prevent the dissemination of timely and accurate information and the streamlining of operations and coordinating efforts within and among governmental entities.
Conclusion
Untrained, ineffective, overloaded, and bureaucratic approaches to communication between a new government and its citizens will slow down the flow of information within governmental entities, causing delays and inefficiencies. This will pose a serious challenge in managing public perception leading to miscommunication and misunderstandings. Overcoming such problematic issues needs a commitment to streamlining communication processes, ensuring data security, and employing clear and accessible language, specially, trained, and effective communicators to do the job.
Some of the strategies that could be used to improve the situation involve the provision of appropriate training to all types of secretaries and establishing clear communication protocols to simplify and clarify communication procedures within government departments. It will help reduce confusion and establish more efficient communication. In this light, it will be necessary for the new government to make appropriate investments that will contribute to managing public perception. Communication needs to be made inclusive and accessible to diverse audiences as it is important to ensure that all citizens can understand and engage with accurate government communications.
The significance of lucid and concise communication should never be underestimated. When leaders, public servants, and citizens communicate effectively, it contributes to building trust, transparency, and a shared understanding. For the new government to function cohesively and efficiently, and serve people well, lucid communication is crucial. Restricting communication channels and using ineffective and inefficient communicators will ultimately lead not only to bad governance but also to the collapse of a new government.
Urgent attention, therefore, needs to be paid to improving communication between the government and entities external to its boundaries, particularly when disseminating government-to-citizen information about policies and services.
It is vital to understand that access to clear communication is not simply a tool for maintaining the reputation of the new government, but also a fundamental necessity for fostering a strong, resilient, and revitalized society. It is an essential aspect of a more inclusive, accountable, and responsive governance that the people of Sri Lanka have been fervently hoping for.
12 December 2024