Coordinating the Government Bureaucracy in Hong Kong: An Institutional Analysis

The change in sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997 has brought about an interesting puzzle: despite a high degree of institutional continuity, the Hong Kong bureaucracy that was considered highly efficient during the colonial era has appeared to turn into an inept administrative structure generating blunder after blunder. The bureaucracy seems to face greater difficulties in horizontal coordination under the new governance, and has lost the ability to produce coherent policy actions.
Drawing upon a literature of institutional analysis, this article examines the institutional design for coordination in the Hong Kong government. The article argues that the bureaucracy in Hong Kong is designed upon a logic of colonial rule. Like any institutional arrangements, the colonial administrative system has inherent coordination limitations. During the colonial era, some smoothing mechanisms were developed as the lubricant for the bureaucracy's operation, but the new governance has inevitably impinged upon some of these—making the bureaucracy more prone to coordination problems.