In contemporary public management discourse, reform has often been viewed as a practical challenge of implementation: The success or failure of policy change is typically attributed to bureaucratic inertia, poor execution, or lack of political will.
Yet, thinkers like Eston (2024) have invited us to reconsider this assumption, suggesting that the roots of reform failure lie far earlier -- in the very design and planning stages.
If reform is compared to cultivating a garden, it is not merely the gardener’s skill but the quality of the seed that determines whether the harvest will flourish.
One critical insight from recent scholarship is that reforms are sometimes adopted not because they are well-suited to the systemic problems at hand but because they carry the allure of novelty or social prestige.
Policy-makers may pursue certain models simply because they are “in vogue,” copying approaches from other contexts without considering the unique institutional and cultural landscapes of their own systems.
Such superficial appeal may generate initial enthusiasm but often masks a misalignment between the reform’s design and the actual challenges it seeks to address.
In this sense, the failure lies not in execution but in the very conceptual “seed” planted.
There exist global examples. In the 1990s, the UK government implemented the "Next Steps" initiative, restructuring its central state by creating semi-autonomous executive agencies. While the reform aimed to improve efficiency, it faced criticism for overemphasizing private sector management principles and weakening democratic accountability.
The reform's design did not adequately consider the unique context of public administration, leading to challenges in its implementation and outcomes.
Another dimension of reform failure stems from misjudgements regarding the costs, benefits, and interdependencies inherent in complex systems. Public management reforms are rarely isolated interventions; they interact with existing structures, stakeholder incentives, and broader socio-political dynamics.
Cognitive biases such as over-optimism, overconfidence, or reliance on readily available information can distort decision-making, leading planners to underestimate risks or overestimate the likelihood of success.
When these miscalculations occur at the design stage, even meticulously executed implementation is unlikely to produce the desired outcomes.
The UK's abolition of the Audit Commission in 2015 led to a shortage of qualified auditors, resulting in unreliable financial data from local councils, police, and fire authorities.
In 2024, the National Audit Office refused to sign off on the government's public sector accounts due to these issues. The reform's design overlooked the complexities of maintaining an effective audit system, leading to significant governance challenges.
The invisible costs of reform significantly matter. Beyond measurable metrics, reforms also entail costs that are subtle or difficult to quantify. These include organizational disruption, erosion of employee morale, unintended effects on service delivery, and opportunity costs of resources diverted from other priorities.
Neglecting these factors during the planning phase often results in reforms that, while technically sound, generate negative consequences that undermine their objectives.
The reform, in essence, is doomed not because the “gardener” is careless, but because the “seed” itself was insufficiently evaluated.
Social care reforms in England are a perfect example of such a phenomenon. England's social care system has faced persistent challenges, with reforms often criticized for lacking a strong financial rationale and reliable data.
A cross-party group of MPs warned that without comprehensive reforms backed by solid data, efforts to overhaul the system may fail. The reform's design did not adequately address the underlying issues, leading to continued inefficiencies and unmet needs.
Recognizing that the design, rather than the execution, often dictates reform outcomes carries profound implications.
It calls for a shift in focus from managerial competence alone to the rigor, context-sensitivity, and evidence base underpinning reform proposals.
Policy-makers must engage in deeper diagnostics, critical reflection on assumptions, and systematic evaluation of potential trade-offs before committing to a course of action.
Successful reform, therefore, is less a triumph of implementation skill and more a testament to thoughtful, context-aware planning.
Looking at Bangladesh
Bangladesh has long embarked on ambitious reform agendas aimed at modernizing governance, improving service delivery, and enhancing public sector efficiency. However, as recent global analyses on reform suggest, the country’s mixed record of success reveals that the core challenges often lie not in execution but in the very design of reform initiatives.
Bangladesh’s reform experience underscores that durable change demands deeper diagnostic groundwork. Future reforms must prioritize evidence-based design that draws from rigorous local diagnostics rather than global templates.
It is crucial to map interdependency to identify how reforms in one sector affect others. Additionally, we need to consider the qualitative costs, such as morale and institutional learning and also consider pilot-based experimentation, allowing for adaptive redesign before full-scale rollout.
By focusing on the design, coherence, and contextual grounding of reform, Bangladesh can enhance the likelihood of achieving meaningful, sustainable transformation.
The metaphor of the seed and the gardener encapsulates a fundamental truth about reform: The best-intentioned efforts cannot compensate for flawed conceptual foundations.
By attending to the quality of the “seed” -- the design, planning, and anticipatory analysis -- public management can reduce the prevalence of reform failure and cultivate interventions that are resilient, effective, and adaptive to complex realities.
The true test of reform success, therefore, lies not in the efficiency of the gardener but in the integrity and viability of the seed planted.
In the end, it is the foresight and integrity embedded in reform design that determines whether the garden of public policy will flourish or wither in Bangladesh.
Dr Mohammad Kamrul Hasan is a Public Administration and Public Policy Analyst.