Executive agencies in Tanzania: liberalization and Third World debt

The purchase of an expensive, debt‐financed aircraft tracking system by one of Tanzania's newly created executive agencies suggests that recent bureaucratic restructuring and liberalization in Tanzania could possibly undermine the good use of international debt management schemes for poverty alleviation. Moreover, it raises a question about the uses (and misuses), in countries where governance capacities are weak, of new public management models of organization. This article explores Tanzania's donor‐funded executive agency programme, as one part of its wider civil service reforms. Drawing on empirical research, it examines the power structures and interdependencies between Ministers, departments and NPM style semi‐autonomous agencies and the potential for rent‐seeking behaviour and perverse outcomes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.