SUMMARY Since 1993, Tanzania has been pursuing a programme of civil service reform which hasemphasized job reduction. In local government the importance of reform and the lack ofprevious training for the manpower management o†cers (MMOs) responsible for job reduc-tion are an argument for training, while the complex institutional arrangements of localgovernment and the di†cult circumstances in which the MMOs work are a potential con-straint on its e•ectiveness. A programme of training for the MMOs and its theoretical under-pinnings in terms of transfer of learning are outlined. Discussion of the programme’se•ectiveness leads to a discussion of the limited e•ectiveness of even well-designed trainingin isolation, and of the complementary organizational and institutional development inter-ventions which are desirable in order to increase its e•ectiveness. Copyright # 1999 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE AND DIFFICULTYOF TRAINING FOR REFORMThis article provides a brief description of civil service reform in Tanzania, focusingon the programme of job reduction which has been its most prominent aspect, andgives an account of some issues that have arisen in applying job reduction to localgovernment. It also describes a programme of training for senior manpower (sic)management o†cers (MMOs), the sta• responsible for human resource management(HRM) in Tanzanian local authorities, in which the authors of this article wereinvolved.While we hope that our description of the reform and the training programme areof interest in themselves, they also throw light on a perennial di†culty, that of thee•ectiveness of training as a vehicle for reform. Training of the public servantprotagonists of reform has been viewed as an essential component in reform e•orts aswidely separated as civil service reform in the transitional economies of EasternEurope (Collins, 1993), economic reform in Myanmar (Cook, 1993) and democra-tization in local authorities in Nigeria (O’Donovan, 1992). Yet in the developmentliterature we meet the widespread view that much administrative training activity indeveloping countries has been a failure (Reilly, 1987; Turner, 1989; Hulme, 1990).(Noristheviewconfinedtodeveloping countries: Mann’s (1984)descriptionofhowa
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