Bureaucratic fragmentation by design? the case of payroll management in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This paper examines the sources of bureaucratic fragmentation and coherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo by exploring the connections and tensions between interface bureaucracies and the back-office administration tasked with managing the public payroll system. Building on the ‘real governance’ literature and the notion of ‘infrastructural power’, we analyse the recent history of payroll management in Congo and especially its evolution over the last decades of state implosion and reconstruction so as to gauge the potential of different drivers of state infrastructural power. The return of the state in the first decades of the twenty-first century led to a spectacular and unprecedented growth in the number of civil servants, made possible by a reconstituted state budget and renewed donor engagement. Yet this growth largely reflects increased political competition and further disarticulated the payroll system, increasing its vulnerability to the issue of ghost workers. The case study shows important trade-offs, in processes of post-conflict reconstruction, between the triple objectives of building state infrastructural power, making use of it to improve public service delivery, and its democratization.