Empirical study of the centrality of citizen-client trust in strategies of public service reform and its relationship with the efficiency of administrative reform models in Africa

Abstract

In order to outrun the models of public administration inherited from colonialism, public institutions in Africa have engaged in a series of frequent and continuous reforms [(Michael, 2005) ; (Darbon, 2003)]. But replacing the old with the new and returning to the old (Haddad et al., 2020), clinically suggests the existence of a crisis of an administrative reform model in Africa. This crisis is only the result of the atrophy of the African citizen-client's Trust in reform strategies and his dissatisfaction with public services. In this context, this paper aims to understand how “citizen-client trust” can contribute to the formulation of effective public service reform strategies in the African administrative sector.

And by analyzing the scientific research that dealt with this topic, we put forward four hypotheses that explain this phenomenon. Therefore, we adopted a qualitative methodology with a case study of six public administrations in Africa to conduct the field study. The objective analysis of the results of this study led to verifying the validity of the hypotheses, as there is a causal relationship between the variable "citizen-client trust" and the efficacy of the "administrative reform model" and a reform strategy based on the concept of citizen-client and the quality of public services.