Bureaucratic fragmentation by design? the case of payroll management in the democratic Republic of Congo
研究刚果民主共和国薪资管理中的官僚碎片化与整合，分析国家重建中政治竞争如何导致薪资系统脱节并滋生幽灵工人问题，揭示国家基础设施权力、公共服务与民主化之间的权衡。
ABSTRACT 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.