Interview with guest researcher Rafael Leite: “It will be great to discover the diversity of administrative practices in Germany”

From October 2024, Rafael Leite from Brazil will be a guest researcher at the National Institute for Public Administration Germany for one year. We are delighted to welcome him and look forward to exchanging experiences with him. He is a recipient of the prestigious German Chancellor Fellowship sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In this interview, he answers five questions about his work and his interest in the German administration.

As part of his German Chancellor Fellowship programme, Rafael Leite will undertake a project investigating the leadership management practices of state governments in Germany. He is particularly interested in understanding what drives reform agendas and who is behind them. Rafael Leite has a degree in Public Administration and has worked in government and civil society organisations. Most recently, he worked as a researcher at a South African think tank called the New South Institute and as a freelance researcher for various institutions in Brazil and multilateral organisations working in Latin America. Rafael Leite will spend October and November at the Institutes headquarters in Speyer and will move to the Berlin office in December.

Five questions for Rafael Leite

What made you decide to spend a research stay at our institute?

Brazil is a huge, federal country with many inequalities. But I often feel that we are quite insular in our engagement with the world. In particular, when it comes to public sector modernisation and reform, Brazil often doesn't look outward.

Since the 1988 Constitution, Brazil has been trying to build a cooperative federalism, which is very different from the American version and in many ways inspired by Germany. Yet, Germany is generally absent from the field of public administration in Brazil, even though the country ranks relatively well in indices of administrative capacity, especially at the local level. So, I wonder why Germany isn't used more as an example in Brazil.

This led me to seek more opportunities to come to Germany to try to do comparative research. That´s how I discovered the German Chancellor Fellowship program and started looking for institutions in Germany that could host me during my stay. I wanted an institution that not only focused on producing knowledge but also had a strong component of dialoguing with the real world of public administration and had a strong connection with subnational governments. Based on these premises, it was quite easy to find that the National Institute for Public Administration Germany would be an excellent institution to seek support and implement my project.

What do you find inspiring about research on and for public administration?

What inspires me about the public sector is that government is an instrument of collective action that allows us to solve problems at scale. It is only through the action of a capable public sector, acting in an articulate and consistent way, that we will be able to tackle pressing issues such as poverty, deforestation and lack of access to quality health and education.

More than that, my interest stems from the desire to contribute to the capacity of public administration to do these things, to contribute to the design of policies and proposals that are technically sound and politically feasible. That's why the Institute's motto 'Research on and for Public Administration' appeals to me. I believe that public administration is one of those fields of research that should never lose sight of the practical component.

What would you like to work on during your stay at our institute?

I will carry out a project investigating the leadership management practices of state governments in Germany. At this moment, I'm still aligning exactly what the limits and scope of my project will be. The initial design was quite broad, so I need to decide exactly which leadership levels within the government I'll look at and which types of agencies within the administration. So right now, I'm also reading a lot to understand how the administrative system works in Germany – from the basics like the structure of human resources organisation, recruitment practices, the boundaries between politics and administration in shaping senior public management and recruitment strategies.

During my time in Germany, I would love to talk to actors who are contributing to debates about state reform and modernisation in Germany, whether they're people in academia, think tanks, civil society, and especially within the government itself. I'd like to do a lot of field research with politicians and administrators, bureaucrats and activists. It will be great to discover the diversity of administrative practices in Germany to think about insights on reform for countries like Brazil and South Africa.

What would you like to learn about the German administration during your stay?

Germany is an incredibly decentralized country, and I deeply appreciate the idea of federalism serving as a laboratory for democracy. It strikes me as a nation where numerous discrete innovations and incremental changes accumulate over time. There's also a prevalent skepticism toward what The Economist once cleverly termed the "Reform Fairy" – the notion that reforms can swiftly solve significant problems with minimal political and economic cost. These characteristics draw me to the German administrative model. However, they also contribute to a challenge I face as an outsider: identifying good practices and innovations that, while innovative in an international context, may seem commonplace to Germans.

I would like to use this opportunity to understand how and when variations occur in the administrative practices of leadership management within Germany's state governments, and the reasons behind these differences. I believe that "personnel is policy": To grasp the priorities of any organisation it's essential to know how it selects its leaders. It's not merely about laws or budgets; those are downstream from leadership choices. Leadership selection reveals much about a country's administrative organisation, priorities, and political economy.

What are you looking forward to during your research stay in Germany?

I would like to contribute to strengthening cooperation between people and organisations working in the field of public administration in Brazil and Germany, and of course, more generally, between those thinking about the transformation and modernisation of the state. I would be happy if I could contribute a grain of sand so that people in Brazil become aware of the good practices adopted here in Germany, thus helping to broaden the horizon of possibilities and creativity in terms of possible measures for Brazil.

It would be a pleasure to contribute to the cooperation on both sides: It would be great to expand the repertoire of alternatives for thinking about state modernisation in Brazil, as well as to generate curiosity in Germany to understand good practices from countries in the Global South in order to influence good practices here.