A professional civil service

Every other reform depends on this one. A ministry cannot draft a law, run a programme or negotiate a chapter without officials who know how, and building that capability is slow, unglamorous and easy to reverse.

What the reform introduced

Competitive recruitment for civil service positions, with published criteria and an examination, replacing appointment by connection.

A distinction between political positions, which change with a government, and administrative positions, which do not. That distinction is the whole point: it is what allows a country to keep its expertise when its politics change.

And a classification and pay structure, so that a specialist can advance without becoming a manager.

The pay problem

Public salaries could not compete with the private sector for exactly the skills the state most needed: lawyers, economists, procurement specialists, IT.

The answer used was reform support offices — teams inside ministries, funded externally at market rates, doing the technical work of reform. It brought in capable people quickly and created a two-tier workforce inside the same building, which is a genuine problem and was accepted as the price of moving.

What is fragile

Every element of this can be undone administratively. A competitive procedure can be run as a formality; a category can be reclassified as political.

That is why accession conditionality treats public administration as a fundamentals chapter: it is the reform most easily reversed and the one everything else sits on.

Building a staff that survives a change of government is the least visible and most decisive reform — because when you work with a country, the continuity of your counterpart is everything. Nothing long-term runs with a directorate that changes every two years. That the fragility sits in pay is familiar too: an institution that cannot compete with the private sector cannot keep the people it has trained.