The human being by conventional wisdom and scientific study is to a very large part a creature of habit. Discovering and applying the principles that allow individuals and businesses to change entrenched behaviors to become more productive, is what makes or breaks social adaptation and economic reason. In a democracy’s institutional behavior, the quest for greater productivity and societal relevance is like the search for the philosopher’s stone of governmental sustainability, or a transformative magic potion that facilitates institutional behavior change and speed of progress by a state and its institutions in service to its sovereign. For an insider perspective on Lebanon’s current challenges towards this end, Executive sat down with Fadi Makki, the minister of state for administrative reform. 

When the office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR) was established back in 1995, its very name stood for an important element in putting Lebanon’s post-conflict public sector on the right development track. As such, OMSAR soon became associated in people’s mind with the activities of UNDP in supporting the Lebanese public sector. Compared to the ministry’s role back then, what is different about the “new” OMSAR today?

As you are aware, OMSAR has been a project-driven ministry. If you have funding, [OMSAR] can work. If you don’t have funding, it has nothing. My predecessors never thought of institutionalizing OMSAR. It had great features in good days, being agile, quick and a magnet for funding. It worked beautifully in times of abundance. But when dire times occurred, the whole thing literally collapsed. 2020 was when OMSAR collapsed and that is when we realized that we should have created capacity, talked about sustainability, and have institutionalized. There were so many learnings. I have inherited what is like a collapsed temple. It has legacy, it has history. It also has some kind of mandate but [this mandate] is not promulgated in law that was adopted in parliament. [The mandate} is not an actual law but was created by the Council of Ministers.

My first task when I came here four months ago, was to reassemble the team. I looked who is still there, who left that I could bring back, and where I could acquire new human resources. How could I be creative in obtaining support. There is so much innovation because “nécessité fait loi”, necessity is the mother of invention. I was eager to open different ways to find resources. I discovered that there is much that you can source from volunteering. You can achieve much with a sort of advanced internships from graduate students from top universities. One could attempt reskilling of whoever was left, the few dozens of people that I still have at the ministry. Re-skilling is something that was never thought about before. You can re-skill, which we did. At the same time, you need funding. We are now using the likes of grants from the EU, UNDP, the Germans and others too, to support what we have, not fully replace. What is different from the old times is that we are not running only on grant money but that we are re-skilling, and using sources such as volunteering and pro-bono support form universities and we are also oiling the wheels for additional funding. Finally, for projects without owner, we are trying to obtain some loans, which speaks for the World Bank loan on digital transformation.

So there are now three main channels of budgeting for OMSAR, one avenue through volunteering and pro bono contributions, one avenue would be through grant money, and one avenue would be debt finance? So there would be no revenue from the usual fiscal sources and taxation?

I have a small budget – the smallest in all the cabinet at about $600,000 – which I use for advisors. OMSAR is not a burden on taxpayers. And getting a loan for IT and technology would be an investment, not an [operating loan], because it has a high return on investment and would trigger and boost [development].

How much of your operational calculation is based on volunteering for the public good? It is a fascinating concept that we witnessed for example through civil society initiatives to light up streets in Beirut in the darkest days of 2021. How much of your mission as a project ministry are you able to fulfill with volunteer contributions?

   Quite a lot. My ministry is 37 people. That is what I inherited. Of those, the professionals, meaning people with degrees, number one third. I have effectively 10 to 12 people that we have to re-skill. I have 20 more who are volunteers or sourced through grants and minimal contracting. So essentially I managed to triple our capacity in creative ways. This said, I am suffering [from human capital depletion] because with more people, I can unlock additional funding. [We need] people who can write concept notes, who can write proposals. We see a lot of good will in the donor community, but we cannot just tell them what we want. That kind of give and take requires advanced [human] resources, someone who has done some project management.

What are currently your most important projects?

Senior recruitment absorbs most of my capacity. I have three pillars; one is admin reform which comprises senior recruitment and the actual reform agenda of restructuring the public administration, the second pillar is digital transformation, and the third, anti-corruption. They go together. You cannot do anti-corruption without digital transformation, and we cannot do that without restructuring the administration. You cannot restructure without recruiting senior experts to oversee administrative reform. It is really a very nice framework that I oversee.

As I said, senior recruitment absorbs most of my capacity, simply because the sheer volume of demand on recruitment is incredible. In the first few months, we had openings for about 24 [senior] positions, between CDR, Ogero, and three regulatory authorities – telecom, civil aviation, and electricity –the privatization [council], Rachid Karami Fair, and a cannabis regulatory authority. These have all been open. We completed two sets of positions, filling eight positions at CDR, and one at Ogero. And [very shortly], we will have four sets of appointments to announce, which will be a very high load. As I speak today, we are looking at the imminent filling of positions at the Electricity Regulatory Authority, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, the [Higher Council of Privatization and PPP], and Tele Liban. These are almost 20 positions in senior capacity, and the recruitment process has been very demanding.

We meet every morning on this topic of senior recruitment where we discuss our targets and issues such as scoring [of candidates], interviewing, discrepancies, arbitration needs, coordination of experts, etc. It is really a big operation and I have been trying to have less personal involvement but there is fire fighting to be done all the time.

Is there still a component of sectarian allocation in the process of appointing ranking civil servants?

Unfortunately, yes. For example, we were told that the president of CDR is Sunni so we had to look at Sunni candidates only. We had a bit more than 30 percent of candidates that were non-Sunni but only looked at Sunnis.

In terms of willingness and desire of qualified candidates by their professional background, is there a supply overhang or a demand overhang, meaning an overabundance of top candidates for each position or a desperate deficit in finding enough technically and personality-wise qualified candidates who want to work as premier civil servants for the Lebanese people?  

There is a very interesting metric, which is the number of people who are applying for a position that has not “normally” been associated with their sect. I have that number, and I want to see more of that. If I am catholic and thus don’t apply for a position, such as president of CDR which has historically been held by a Sunni person, my not applying is a sign that I do not trust the system even though I heard the President and cabinet promising reform and talking about the reshuffling of positions. We have been looking at this figure as an important metric of trust.

Are you a builder of meritocracy?

Within constraints. There are certain rules that we are operating within. When we grade candidates, the information for name, sect, and gender is masked, so the people who are evaluating, don’t know who they are evaluating. But to be realistic, on another level, we can look at the sect filter. It is meritocracy in the sense that those who we are naming in the short list, are the best. But it is not always the case that we are able to attract the very best from outside [of electronic recruitment channels on the platform of OMSAR]. That is why we are wondering if we need some room for head hunting.

Do you use any AI tool in the process?

We got an offer recently. Suppose we have about 640 candidates for CDR positions. What we currently do is evaluate against minimum requirements – if a candidate meets them or not – and then a second filter, get the score, get the civil service score, and then a third score. It is really scientific. One interviewing company came to me and said, they could do that in one hour, providing a ranking and recommendation without even needing to short list, based on the competency framework that we give them. However, I do not think that this is ready yet. It could be deployed with some validation but I don’t think it is perfectly legal. In a bid to be entrepreneurial, I am going to ask people to give us the permission to experiment with this, just to evaluate if the AI is reaching similar results as the official process. But principally, the limitations of AI would have to be disclosed and the perception of using an AI tool would need to be managed carefully.

As you were saying, there was no real institution building at OMSAR during the project-driven 25 years of activity before the collapse of 2020. Why?

Not at OMSAR, and not at other institutions. I will tell you why. I was a beneficiary. I was director general at the Ministry of Economy from 2003 to 2005 and I at that time benefited from the technical assistance that OMSAR provided to the MoE, helping us in creating the planning and performance monitoring function. OMSAR wanted us to create a unit but we could not recruit at that time [due to a public sector hiring stop], so we could not populate that unit with staff. So we were enacting focal points, which means asking someone who is doing other things to also be responsible for performance planning, which is not ideal. I do not like focal point as a concept. Almost 25 years later, we still do not have planning functions at every ministry. It is still one of my top priorities to create such planning functions. But I want it through creation of units. It might sound strange to say that we want to hire in staffing new units in the administration, but I do not see any other way to build a public administration.

The administration is no longer as bloated as it once was. We are running with 30 percent of needed capacity and sometimes there are even more vacancies. Therefore, we can no longer speak about implementing reform without adding staff while reskilling existing manpower and letting some go who can no longer fit.

In the mission statement on the OMSAR website, the three pillars are good governance, capacity building, and digital transformation. Anti-corruption is of course intrinsic to good governance, but the original mission focus on building capacity makes it sound somehow like OMSAR in the past was tasked with capacity building – but without building OMSAR’s own institutional capacity. Isn’t this a bit of a logical incoherence?

Yes, OMSAR was tasked with building capacity without building its own capacity first. This was a major shortcoming and that is why we are trying to avoid this by becoming institutionalized and perhaps create it as proper ministry, not as office of a minister of state. Right now it is a state minister’s office that is tasked with admin reform. In order for the donors to say that it is the most important ministry, it has to be a ministry for admin reform. It is on everybody’s mind that we need to do financial reform but at the same time we need to do admin reform. Without it, you can no longer do proper implementation of governance. Therefore, the time is right to properly institutionalize from inside of the ministry so that it becomes on-par with the big ministries.

Admin reform has been done on contractual basis with funding coming from here and there, but senior administrative appointments are here to stay and we need to think of something, a mechanism to contract people into senior positions, constantly upskill them, shift them and move them around. That human resource funding and strategy is what we need to play more and more fully. 

You mentioned several times the concept of skill building, reskilling, or upskilling. This brings to my mind that you developed a paper and whole study on e-readiness back in 2003, one in which OMSAR found this e-readiness to be low or wanting in the administration and elsewhere. Today the e-readiness seems still to be wanting but at the same time, we usually mean a totally different concept when one talks about e-readiness in context of a digital society, not just such things like landline penetration rates and basic ICT infrastructures. What does the high intensity and speed of digital development mean for your quest of reskilling people at OMSAR? How difficult is it to re-skill people?

It is difficult but it equally is an opportunity. Because you could leapfrog. We lost so many [of our administrative human] resources. Therefore, and I am talking here about the core administrative functions, the fiscal burden is no longer [as high as] it used to be. Pensioners are a separate consideration and I do not want to talk about the situation in the military. The hard-core administration is nothing [in terms of cost] compared to what it was before. This is a golden opportunity to invest in those [civil servants] who are remaining. We want to give those who stayed skills in planning, digital transformation, performance monitoring, and some technical skills.

At the same time, you want to bring in a very limited number [of new people]. You no longer need a full cache. This cache is now two thirds vacant. Yet, we don’t want to refill every position. We want to transform the administration and make it more agile, more compact, and create a modern ministry. At the same time, we want [to hire people] to fill new administrative units of HR functions, planning and performance monitoring, and digital transformation functions. We need to map the administration and reskill some to fill the new functions, hire for the new functions and let some [people] go from the old functions. At the same time, we want to reengineer the [government] services. Technology and AI gives us the opportunity to do that. Its leapfrogging because you do not need anymore to automate the administration as it is. You could simply short-circuit many processes and cut down on red tape. From user perspective, there could be many cuts in the services value chain. So the sequence is restructuring, reengineering the services, and then filling positions to support these services.

Leapfrogging is something that has been called for by OMSAR but that Lebanon somehow has not been good at over the past 30 years. Another hot term in corporate advisory is nudging, and it is a term that you have promoted previously in your career. Will nudging – gently pushing people into policy and behavior compliance – be part of your strategy?

You probably noticed from the ministerial declaration at the start of this government that I managed to have the term behavioral science included as one of the principles in forming the administration. I am proud to have injected this. If you want, “piece of me” into this declaration. There is a lot of room for nudging and behavioral science in senior recruitment. By creating a shortlist with some kind of implicit ranking of candidates. Even though it is a shortlist and the ministers are free to choose the number four name, it will be slightly more difficult for them because they then have to prove why they choose the number four and not the number one candidate. This is behaviorally informing a shortlist. There is room for behavioral science.

There even is a lot of room for nudging even in anti-corruption and we will integrate those aspects into our new strategy for 2026 to 2030, which we are currently working on. We are trying to change perceptions and social norms. There are perceptions that there is so much corruption, making [the administration] a basket case. But in the moment when you are starting to change that perception with facts and numbers, of how many are applying [for civil service positions] and how much trust there is, perceptions change. We have to work with scientific tools where we are changing perceptions – and when you change perceptions, you start changing behaviors.

As far as collaborations, there are your collaborations with other Lebanese ministries as well as collaborations with the international community or external partners. Half of the news items on your website highlight meetings with this or that ambassador or this or that international representative.  It is obvious that outreach is important for OMSAR. Within this network building and outreach, both internally and externally, what are your priorities?

In Lebanon, priorities are horizontal. I need to regain trust of three groups of stakeholders. My first group is citizens. I need to regain their trust. They kind of gave up on us, and I need to [build trust] inch by inch, using everything available to me: metrics, numbers, scientific methods, nudging, to change perceptions and change behavior. I also need to regain trust of the donor community because they gave up trusting us about five years ago. So many things happened during that time, we had the financial collapse, the corruption saga, the garbage saga, the thawra, the corona crisis, the port explosion. We had the total disintegration of government services. We saw [donor] support going straight into other NGOs or humanitarian relief but not into public administration. We are trying to regain this trust. And thirdly, we need to regain the trust of other ministries. And this is extremely important. OMSAR has been a kind of incubator and innovator that was carrying the torch of digital transformation in the government and was restructuring – and all of this collapsed five or six years ago. So ministries went it alone. Whoever managed to get a bit of funding, started a fragmented process, and this is extremely dangerous. But before I can tell them to stop doing this and to come and speak to us, I need my capacity. I am building my capacity and making sure that I am running ahead of them and do not slow them down, but I need to start putting some regulatory framework and standards in place so that they join this and that the different entities and ministries start speaking to one another and install systems that are interoperable. It is now my duty to regain the trust of the ministries. Otherwise, we are going to have a massive, chaotic, and fragmented projectization in services and in digital transformation in particular. This keeps me form sleeping because it would be an irreversible damage.

Your ministry by default has a mission that relates to issues of public entities and ministries, from gender equality in the administration to computerization and automation, skill development, and so your fingers should be in every ministry as far as those issues. Is that right?

Absolutely. But what we are doing now, is central planning and decentralized implementation. OMSAR will never be a big team and huge ministry, but I have to have a central planning function and team that does standard setting, that issues guidelines, and creates model ministries. There needs to be some handholding but not implementation. Implementation has to be decentralized, but in an orderly and organized fashion.

In the years of the pre-crisis phase, in 2018-19, there were ministries such as the Ministry of Investment and Technology or the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, both led by ministers of state. In 2025, we see roles in digital transformation being held by the new Ministry of Investment and Technology Affairs, as well as by the Ministry of Telecommunications. How does OMSAR collaborate with the latter? Will it be necessary to establish a ministry of AI and digital transformation?

The creation of a ministry for technology and AI is a fact. The question is how we can minimize overlap and create more synergies between both of us. The basic idea is that we need a regulator. Will this ministry be the regulator? Or will this ministry be creating another regulator? I have a conceptual problem if there is a ministry to create a regulator. We should be very thrifty or efficient in how many organizations we create. It looks like it is good for them to play a role as far as standard setting and technology advisory. But it should stop here. Any service reengineering and redesign should be closely linked to admin reform and stay under OMSAR. This makes sense and we have seen different examples for this.

You have different models and responsibilities with regard to digital transformation in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia, for example. There are different models so we have best to imagine the value chain. The value chain is thus: policy making, regulatory oversight, standard setting, and implementation and operations. And we are trying to make sure that this is clear. Implementation should stay within ministries, as for regulation, we should look at data regulation, cybersecurity, and many aspects of technology, the APIs and the interoperability. There is room for a technology regulator and there is room for the middle ware, the infrastructure that links all ministries through a seamless platform. However, the reengineering of services, is clearly an OMSAR mandate, the capacity building on digital services is clearly an OMSAR mandate, and so is the communication with citizens on the update of services,

And you are also in the driver’s seat as far as appointing the regulatory authorities that should ideally be independent from ministries?

And here I have now a suggestion. The Ministry of Telecommunications is involved in digital transformation where they look after data centers and have the connectivity. There is the Ministry of AI and Technology, there is OMSAR, and there is the Ministry of Industry that oversees Colibat for e-signatures, plus there is the Ministry of Justice that oversees some issues of signatures, and the Ministry of Finance that looks at payment gateways, and the central bank also is involved. What we need is some kind of a supreme council or higher institution, just like we have the higher privatization council. It is high time that in addition to the Ministry of Technology, the regulator, and OMSAR, we bring everybody together under the umbrella of one council headed by the prime minister. Something like this will be essential for coordination.

In the Saudi framework that you alluded to, it seems that the pivotal role of the crown prince is something that could not be easily replicated in Lebanon.

But we do have the executive function, so the prime minister should be playing the role.

From an ex officio perspective, definitely, but the permanence of leadership positions seems different between the Lebanese system and other regional government systems, with many questions about the best method. This brings us back to behavioral science and the question why humans behave as they do. Thinking about another behavioral case seen in the governance system of a global power, one that has lately been occupying the minds of people in most countries, is your ministry playing the role of a department of government efficiency? Are you Beirut Elon?

Am I DOGE? Not yet. But eventually we have to think of administrative efficiency and the fact that we have three pools [of people] at ministries and government: those who want to go, for whom we need to create a graceful exit; then there is the hard-working administration group of people who are re-skillable and we need to invest in them, and not only reskill them but also think of higher salaries. This becomes actually easy since we are no longer a bloated administration. And then there is the third pool that will come from outside and need an appropriate salary scale. This is something that has a DOGE element. So not yet but eventually we will be needing to fulfill a government efficiency role.

In closing, talking about meritocracy and sectarian limitations, I want to add that there are a few cases where we have recently presented shortlists for senior recruitment candidates to the Council of Ministers. These shortlists contain names of people from different sects – and this will be a premiere. Even if the candidate is chosen who is member of sect that also previously was grandfathering this role, it is a breakthrough that we had the courage of taking the shortlist to the Council of Ministers with names where not only the Catholic candidate for the Tele Liban chairmanship is included but also the Maronite. This is already taking things halfway to a meritocratic system. I am extremely happy that at least on a few positions, we have made recommendations [which diverged from the historic pattern].

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