In the past decades, Kazakhstan has been undergoing the gradual transition from a planned to a market economy, including the commoditydriven economic surge of the first decade of this century and the recent impetus for a transformation of public governance. In May 2015, the President of the Republic unveiled a vast and ambitious programme of reforms entitled the 100 Concrete Steps, in order to bring about five institutional transformations: the creation of a modem and professional civil service; the establishment of the rule of law; industrialization and economic growth; a unified nation for the future; and transparency and accountability of the state. In January 2017, the President announced a further revision of the Constitution, aiming in particular to devolve some of the powers of the Presidency to the Cabinet and to the Parliament.

This report updates and expands the assessment and the recommendations of the 2014 OECD Review of the Central Administration in Kazakhstan in two specific areas: the mechanisms and structures for strategy and policy making; and the functions of the executive and its relations with its subsidiary bodies. In both these areas, Kazakhstan’s government has adopted a gradual approach to reforming the organisation and practices that it inherited from the Soviet Union. But in recent years the global recession and the slump in commodity prices have put Kazakhstan’s model of development under strain and increased the need for further progress in modernising the country’s governance structures. The government is aware of this, and is currently engaged in numerous reform initiatives in accordance with the 100 Concrete Steps programme set by the president in 2015. The report reviews the measures recently taken or under consideration in the aforementioned areas, identifies their strengths and weaknesses and proposes avenues for further progress.

The government has introduced several meaningful changes in its strategic planning, performance assessment and audit procedures in the past two years. The authority of the Accounts Committee has been notably strengthened, and a number of purely formal and/or redundant procedures have been simplified.

This first section provides context in which to situate the recent measures that the government has undertaken to reform its structures and organisation. The topics covered in this overview are: 1) the evolution of governance in Kazakhstan since its independence; 2) the general conclusions of the review of the central administration conducted by the OECD in 2014 and its recommendations; and 3) the five areas of institutional reforms and the 100 Concrete Steps roadmap defined by President Nazarbayev in May 2015.

This chapter reviews and assesses ongoing reforms aiming to transform and modernise strategy- and policy making in the government, particularly when it comes to the role of the Centre of Government (CoG) and the autonomy of line ministries. Two processes largely determine the relations between the CoG (Presidential Administration, Prime Minister’s Chancellery, Ministry of the National Economy, Ministry of Finance, Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Anti-Corruption) and line ministries in the government of Kazakhstan: planning, which provides a framework for ministerial strategyand policy making; and evaluation, through which ministerial activities are closely monitored and assessed. Both processes have undergone legal transformations in the past months. The chapter exposes the main lines of both processes, reviews and assesses the impact of recent reforms, and makes recommendations for further progress towards effective strategy- and policy making.

This chapter focuses on the reshaping of the public sector through functional reviews, the devolution of state functions to the private sector and privatisation. As previously, these reforms will be reviewed from the standpoint of their design (principally by the MNE and the Ministry of Finance) as well as from the perspective of their implementation (by line ministries, in particular the MID).