More fundamentally, there are concerns that personnel are not always in the right positions, doing the right jobs, with the right capabilities and meeting job-position requirements.
At commune level, local authorities are now taking on numerous tasks requiring legal, technical and specialised expertise in areas such as land management, construction, finance, justice, civil status, labour, support for people with meritorious services, social welfare and the environment.
However, implementation capacity remains uneven. Currently, only about 53% of provincial-level personnel and around 30% of commune-level personnel are assessed as fully meeting job requirements.
In the next phase, attention will shift more decisively to a more fundamental question: whether the post-reorganisation administrative apparatus is actually operating more effectively, providing better services to the people and unlocking resources for development.
Therefore, in 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs needs to focus on guiding the standardisation of job positions and the staffing structure at commune level.
The priority should not be to increase or reduce staffing quotas based on an across-the-board approach, but to correctly determine staffing needs based on population size, geographic area, workload, degree of urbanisation and local characteristics.
It should also clarify the competency framework for officials and civil servants in the new period, establish mechanisms for transferring, seconding and increasing personnel with specialised expertise for communes, and provide guidance on substantive assessments of officials and civil servants, using performance, outputs and the satisfaction levels of people and businesses as the primary measures.
At the same time, the Ministry of Home Affairs should coordinate with relevant agencies to bring about a significant shift in the training and professional development of commune-level officials and civil servants, as this is a task of decisive importance to improving the quality of grassroots government operations.
It should work with ministries and localities to promptly implement the plan on strengthening the training and professional development of officials and civil servants at communes, wards and special zones for the 2026-2031 period.
This includes developing nationally shared digital learning materials for commune-level officials and civil servants, sets of practical case studies for each field, a competency assessment question bank and training programmes based on job positions.
The approach to training officials and civil servants also needs to be renewed, with the aim of enhancing their capacity to perform public duties, their ability to innovate and improve themselves, and their readiness and adaptability to new tasks.
The Ministry of Home Affairs also needs to focus on advising on the completion of institutional frameworks governing organisational structures, the operational capacity of local governments, and decentralisation and delegation of authority, thereby contributing to qualitative improvements in national governance, local governance and the capacity to serve the people.
The quality of decentralisation should be reassessed in substantive terms: rather than simply recording how many tasks have been transferred, it is necessary to answer whether the bodies to which powers have been delegated have sufficient personnel, authority, data, funding, infrastructure and oversight mechanisms.
Decentralisation should be assessed periodically based on service delivery outcomes, processing times and the satisfaction levels of people and businesses.
In addition, the National Assembly and its Standing Committee should consider prioritising the inclusion, in the law-making programme, of amendments and supplements to laws, resolutions and ordinances that remain inconsistent with the new organisational model, particularly regulations on authority, coordination mechanisms among different levels of government, and specialised organisations and agencies.
Consideration should also be given to establishing wards of sufficient scale to serve as development hubs for provinces and cities, guided by the principle that administrative restructuring should not be driven by numerical targets or cause unnecessary disruption, while administrative-unit shortcomings should not be allowed to hinder development.
