Bureaucracy as Assemblage: Civil Service Reform, Administrative Legacies and the Politics of Informalization in the Democratic Republic of Congo

In its own evaluation of the civil service reform project that took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2014 and 2021, the World Bank concluded that the project was ‘moderately unsatisfactory’. It explained this characterization by referring to complex political dynamics, including a waning political will at the highest level. Built on a conceptualization of the Congolese administration as a socially and historically situated assemblage, this analysis of the reform foregrounds the role of administrative legacies. Both object and subject of the reform, the practices that allowed the administration to survive decades of fiscal collapse — the informalization of civil service employment and pay — proved pivotal. Far from simply failing to respond to external reform pressures, the administration repurposed and refracted reform initiatives according to its own entrenched logics (clientelist recruitment, reliance on salary supplements and the pursuit of positional security), with uneven and contradictory effects. Viewed from this angle, a more nuanced picture of reform outcomes emerges, which acknowledges the multiplicity of interests and responsibilities involved in the design and implementation of the reform, including those of the World Bank, whose tacit acquiescence of implementation dynamics may have further deepened informalization patterns.