It wasn’t a surprise to know that Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government has decided to conduct a case study on the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) through the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
It wasn’t a surprise either to read the media comments criticizing the study saying that it focused on the transparency of SAGIA. Those commentators attacked the secrecy that prevails in the dealings with the recent crop of economic cities and other projects.
This will be the first time a government organization has been studied for effective governance in the Middle East by Harvard University.
This study will show how the Kingdom can serve as a source of innovation and as a good governance leadership model for the rest of the world.
Yet I would like to mention that choosing SAGIA or other public institutions for study cases in sophisticated universities such as Harvard doesn’t necessarily mean praising their performance or complimenting their achievements.
It all depends on the results of the analyses. It’s expected that there are weak aspects that need reviewing and reforming. In March 2000 the Saudi Ports Authority presented its experience in a specialized forum organized by the JFK School of Government. The one-week program was titled “Managing Change”. In that forum, experiences in the energy and telecommunications privatization in Asia and South America were addressed.
There were, indeed, very successful experiences, as well as unsuccessful ones, that started on the basis of political decisions that didn’t provide the required tools to transfer the sector from public management to private enterprise. At that time, the program of privatizing the Saudi port services was in its early stages still and three years only passed since its initiation. Yet the mechanisms the program adopted and the results it achieved in doubling the performance and attracting foreign investors won over Harvard’s experts.
The Kingdom has many experiences in management that are worth studying and analyzing in an unbiased way.
