Latest Resources
Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Inter-Governmental OrganizationRapidly rising attention to the quality of governance in developing countries is driving explosive growth in the use of governance “indicators” by international investors, donors of official development assistance, development analysts and academics. This study helps both users and producers of governance indicators to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the best and most widely used...
Measuring Governance
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Inter-Governmental OrganizationThe use of governance indicators, as applied to developing countries, has grown spectacularly in recent years. Following the maxim that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, international investors and official development aid agencies, together with academics and the media, have turned widely to using quantitative governance indicators for both analytical and decision-making purposes –...
Working Paper I What Is Governance?
Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankThis paper is part of an effort to better measure governance. The paper points to the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states, that is, executive branches and their bureaucracies. The author argues, that much of the problem is conceptual, since there is very little agreement on what constitutes high-quality government. The paper suggests four approaches: (1) procedural...
Briefing | Malawi | More than just ‘demand’: Malawi’s public-service community scorecard
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Governance and MDG, Public Administration, Civil SocietyCommunity-based monitoring instruments, such as scorecards, are used increasingly to complement and reinforce conventional mechanisms to strengthen accountability and performance in public-service delivery. While they have been backed by the international community, there is limited evidence on how they work in practice and what conditions they need to be effective. This Project Briefing seeks...
The Benefits of a Big Tent: Opening Up Government in Developing Countries
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankBringing open data and open government under a single banner, Yu and Robinson argue, leads to conceptual muddling that ultimately impedes progress for both projects. They express a concern that superficial commitments to open data “can placate the public’s appetite for transparency.” Drawing on our experiences with the Kenya Open Data Initiative and the Open Government Partnership, we argue...
Tanzania - Urban local government strengthening program : fiduciary systems assessment
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Local Governance and Decentralization, Inter-Governmental OrganizationIn 2004, Government of Tanzania (GoT) introduced the Local Government Capital Development Grant (LGCDG) as a grant flow to local governments. The LGCDG has evolved into the Local Government Development Grant (LGDG) program with several sub-programs and has become a mainstream performance based fiscal transfer. LGDG started the provision of on-budget funding flow to the local government level...
When is Community-Based Monitoring Effective? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Primary Health in Uganda
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyA growing number of experts argue that more emphasis must be placed on strengthening beneficiary control that is, strengthening providers accountability to citizens/clients. This report tests whether social heterogeneity in Uganda can explain why some communities managed to push for better health service delivery while others did not. While there is evidence that such an approach can...
Una nueva generación de sistemas de evaluación de desempeño en América Central. Panoramas de un recorrido reciente
Article / Working Paper, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankExamina las característica de una nueva generacíon de sistema de evaluacíon de de desempeño en América Central. Se procura identificar si los mismos han tomado elementos de un enfoque centrado en el desarrollo de las personas. El recorrido realizado es importante pero hay pendientes y desafíos con el propósito de lograr un sistema efectivamente centrado en el aprendizaje organizacional, el...
Improving the quality of governance in Poland through performance based budgeting
Article / Working Paper, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThe paper asks whether performance based budgeting (PBB) can serve as a tool for implementing the rules of good governance in Polish state administration. The authors put emphasis on analyzing de facto mechanisms of PBB implementation rather than focusing only on de jure ones. In other words, they use sociological and politological approaches combined with some insights from recent studies on...
Monitoring and Evaluation when Politics Matters l Background Paper
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Civil SocietyEveryone agrees that there is a crucial role for research and evidence in development policy-making. But the apparently simple claim that policy decisions should be based upon clear and rigorous evidence of value and effectiveness masks the inherently political – and normative - nature of how we define what counts as ‘valid evidence’, and what this means for policy decisions. This is the...