Building Ethics and Integrity in the Public Sector in Developing Countries: The Search of a Superlative Approach Using the Uganda's Case

摘要

Building ethics and integrity in the public sector is a global concern that requires governments of respective nations to establish and enforce measures aimed at ensuring the attainment of the two values. Proper ethical foundations and practices are highly desirable notably in the public sector. The virtues, in the Ugandan case are comparatively emphasized in relation to the civil servants than politicians. Public ethics however can be clearly understood through critical analyses of theoretical meanings attached to the individual actions and through the perspectives in which ethics and integrity are conceived in public administration and management. Key arguments raised in this paper therefore examine the way in which the behavior of public servants are reflective of the conceptual understanding of ethics and integrity. Arguments of ethics in the public service are rarely isolated from integrity of the public servants. By the fact that consequences of eroded ethics highly correlate with loss of integrity, vast of existing literature—of which this discussion does not contest— tend to examine ethics and integrity concepts concurrently. Observance of ethics and integrity in the public sector is emphasized through a number of measures, the conventional one being establishment and enforcement of Codes of conduct. The paper assesses the relevance of some mechanisms being adopted to avert unethical practices in the public sector in developing countries like Uganda. At the beginning, the paper spells the conceptual meaning of the ethics and integrity in the public sector context. It further explores various attempts that Uganda has instituted to improve ethics and integrity in the public sector. The author draws conclusions and advances suggestions to narrow the emerging public sector ethical gaps.