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.

中文翻译：

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设计的官僚分裂？刚果民主共和国的工资管理案例

本文通过探讨接口官僚机构与负责管理公共工资系统的后台行政部门之间的联系和紧张关系，研究了刚果民主共和国官僚机构碎片化和连贯性的来源。基于“真正的治理”文献和“基础设施权力”的概念，我们分析了刚果工资管理的近期历史，尤其是过去几十年国家内爆和重建的演变，以评估不同驱动因素的潜力。国家基础设施力量。国家在 21 世纪头几十年的回归导致公务员人数出现了前所未有的惊人增长，这得益于重组的国家预算和重新参与捐助者。然而，这种增长在很大程度上反映了政治竞争的加剧和工资系统的进一步脱节，增加了它对幽灵工人问题的脆弱性。案例研究表明，在冲突后重建过程中，在建设国家基础设施力量、利用它来改善公共服务提供和民主化这三个目标之间进行重要权衡。