The five drivers for improving public sector performance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lessons from the new World Bank Global Report: “Almost daily, headlines in the world’s leading newspapers are full of examples of public sector failures: public money is mismanaged or outright misused; civil servants are not motivated or are poorly trained; government agencies fail to coordinate with each other; and as a result, citizens are either deprived of quality public services, or must go through a bureaucratic maze to access them.

These public-sector challenges are often present even in the world’s most developed countries. They are of course further exacerbated by lower levels of development.

So what hope do low and middle-income countries have to make their public sectors function more effectively? Is this just a futile enterprise altogether?

We believe it is not. Our new Global Report, Improving Public Sector Performance Through Innovation and Inter-Agency Coordination, argues that positive change is possible in many low and middle-income countries. The report collects 15 inspiring country cases of such reforms and shows that such change does not necessarily require huge financial investment or complex IT systems. What seems to be required, instead, are five interconnected drivers of success:

  • Political leadership is needed because few, if any, of the innovations are a purely technocratic exercise.  Leaders need to find ways to collaborate with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders to overcome inherent opposition.
  • Institutional capacity building of existing bodies is a common element across many of the 15 cases. For reforms to endure, one ultimately needs to create sustainable institutions.
  • Incentives matter, both at the institutional level (e.g., through government-wide policy, creating systems and structures that shape institutional objectives, and program monitoring systems) as well as at the level of civil servants (e.g., through performance targets and reward systems).
  • Increased transparency can help deliver change in public sector performance by breaking down government silos and ensuring inter-agency information-sharing, and publishing or disseminating performance information.  Transparency can also be a powerful driver for changing incentives.
    • Technology, while not a panacea, is present in two-thirds of the featured cases. The reformers applied relevant, even basic, IT tools and know-how to their specific functional requirements and did not over-design their efforts.  Furthermore, the technology application is rarely a stand-alone solution; rather, it is accompanied by policies and procedures to change behavior….(More)”.

The causal effect of trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Björn Bartling, Ernst Fehr, David Huffman and Nick Netzer: “Trust affects almost all human relationships – in families, organizations, markets and politics. However, identifying the conditions under which trust, defined as people’s beliefs in the trustworthiness of others, has a causal effect on the efficiency of human interactions has proven to be difficult. We show experimentally and theoretically that trust indeed has a causal effect. The duration of the effect depends, however, on whether initial trust variations are supported by multiple equilibria.

We study a repeated principal-agent game with multiple equilibria and document empirically that an efficient equilibrium is selected if principals believe that agents are trustworthy, while players coordinate on an inefficient equilibrium if principals believe that agents are untrustworthy. Yet, if we change the institutional environment such that there is a unique equilibrium, initial variations in trust have short-run effects only. Moreover, if we weaken contract enforcement in the latter environment, exogenous variations in trust do not even have a short-run effect. The institutional environment thus appears to be key for whether trust has causal effects and whether the effects are transient or persistent…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing reliable local data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Lawrence Sumner, Emily M. Farris, and Mirya R. Holman: “The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated.

We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics, using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowd-sourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that non-experts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data….All data from the project available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/2chainz …(More)”.

Global Trends in Democracy: Background, U.S. Policy, and Issues for Congress

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Michael A. Weber for the Congressional Research Service: “Widespread concerns exist among analysts and policymakers over the current trajectory of democracy around the world. Congress has often played an important role in supporting and institutionalizing U.S. democracy promotion, and current developments may have implications for U.S. policy, which for decades has broadly reflected the view that the spread of democracy around the world is favorable to U.S. interests.

The aggregate level of democracy around the world has not advanced for more than a decade. Analysis of data trendlines from two major global democracy indexes indicates that, as of 2017, the level of democracy around the world has not advanced since around the year 2005 or 2006. Although the degree of democratic backsliding around the world has arguably been modest overall to this point, some elements of democracy, particularly those associated with liberal democracy, have receded during this period. Declines in democracy that have occurred may have disproportionately affected countries with larger population sizes. Overall, this data indicates that democracy’s expansion has been more challenged during this period than during any similar period dating back to the 1970s. Despite this, democratic declines to this point have been considerably less severe than the more pronounced setbacks that occurred during some earlier periods in the 20th century.

Numerous broad factors may be affecting democracy globally. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • The growing international influence of nondemocratic governments. These countries may in some instances view containing the spread of democracy as instrumental toward other goals or as helpful to their own domestic regime stability. Thus they may be engaging in various activities that have negative impacts on democracy internationally. At the same time, relatively limited evidence exists to date of a more affirmative agenda to promote authoritarian political systems or norms as competing alternatives to democracy.
  • The state of democracy’s global appeal as a political system. Challenges to and apparent dissatisfaction with government performance within democracies, and the concomitant emergence of economically successful authoritarian capitalist states, may be affecting in particular democracy’s traditional instrumental appeal as the political system most capable of delivering economic growth and national prestige. Public opinion polling data indicate that democracy as a political system may overall still retain considerable appeal around the world relative to nondemocratic alternatives.
  • Nondemocratic governments’ use of new methods to repress political dissent within their own societies. Tools such as regulatory restrictions on civil society and technology-enhanced censorship and surveillance are arguably enhancing the long-term durability of nondemocratic forms of governance.
  • Structural conditions in nondemocracies. Some scholars argue that broad conditions in many of the world’s remaining nondemocracies, such as their level of wealth or economic inequality, are not conducive to sustained democratization. The importance of these factors to democratization is complex and contested among experts.

Democracy promotion is a longstanding, but contested, element of U.S. foreign policy. Wide disagreements and wellworn policy debates persist among experts over whether, or to what extent, the United States should prioritize democracy promotion in its foreign policy. Many of these debates concern the relevance of democracy promotion to U.S. interests, its potential tension with other foreign policy objectives, and the United States’ capacity to effectively promote democratization.

Recent developments pose numerous potential policy considerations and questions for Congress. Democracy promotion has arguably not featured prominently in the Trump Administration’s foreign policy to this point, creating potential continued areas of disagreement between some Members of Congress and the Administration. Simultaneously, current challenges around the world present numerous questions of potential consideration for Congress. Broadly, these include whether and where the United States should place greater or lesser emphasis on democracy promotion in its foreign policy, as well as various related questions concerning the potential tools for promoting democracy…(More)”.

Governing Artificial Intelligence: Upholding Human Rights & Dignity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mark Latonero that “…shows how human rights can serve as a “North Star” to guide the development and governance of artificial intelligence.

The report draws the connections between AI and human rights; reframes recent AI-related controversies through a human rights lens; and reviews current stakeholder efforts at the intersection of AI and human rights.

This report is intended for stakeholders–such as technology companies, governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society groups, academia, and the United Nations (UN) system–looking to incorporate human rights into social and organizational contexts related to the development and governance of AI….(More)”.

Open Government Data Report: Enhancing Policy Maturity for Sustainable Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: This report provides an overview of the state of open data policies across OECD member and partner countries, based on data collected through the OECD Open Government Data survey (2013, 2014, 2016/17), country reviews and comparative analysis. The report analyses open data policies using an analytical framework that is in line with the OECD OUR data Index and the International Open Data Charter. It assesses governments’ efforts to enhance the availability, accessibility and re-use of open government data. It makes the case that beyond countries’ commitment to open up good quality government data, the creation of public value requires engaging user communities from the entire ecosystem, such as journalists, civil society organisations, entrepreneurs, major tech private companies and academia. The report also underlines how open data policies are elements of broader digital transformations, and how public sector data policies require interaction with other public sector agendas such as open government, innovation, employment, integrity, public budgeting, sustainable development, urban mobility and transport. It stresses the relevance of measuring open data impacts in order to support the business case for open government data….(More)”.

Whither large International Non-Governmental Organisations?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working Paper by Penny Lawrence: “Large international non-government organisations (INGOs) seem to be in an existential crisis in their role in the fight for social justice. Many, such as Save the Children or Oxfam, have become big well-known brands with compliance expectations similar to big businesses. Yet the public still imagine them to be run by volunteers. Their context is changing so fast, and so unpredictably, that they are struggling to keep up. It is a time of extraordinary disruptive change including the digital transformation, changing societal norms and engagement expectations and political upheaval and challenge. Fifteen years ago the political centre-ground in the UK seemed firm, with expanding space for civil society organisations to operate. Space for civil society voice now seems more threatened and challenged (Kenny 2015).

There has been a decline in trust in large charities in particular, partly as a result of their own complacency, acting as if the argument for aid has been won. Partly as a result of questioned practices e.g. the fundraising scandal of 2016/17 (where repeated mail drops to individuals requesting funds caused public backlash) and the safeguarding scandal of 2018 (where historic cases of sexual abuse by INGO staff, including Oxfam, were revisited by media in the wake of the #me too movement). This is also partly as a result of political challenge on INGOs’ advocacy and influencing role, their bias and their voice:

‘Some government ministers regard the charity sector with suspicion because it largely employs senior people with a left-wing perspective on life and because of other unfair criticisms of government it means there is regularly a tension between big charities and the conservative party’ Richard Wilson (Former Minister for Civil Society) 2018

On the other hand many feel that charities who have taken significant contracts to deliver services for the state have forfeited their independent voice and lost their way:

‘The voluntary sector risks declining over the next ten years into a mere instrument of a shrunken state, voiceless and toothless, unless it seizes the agenda and creates its own vision.’ Professor Nicholas Deakin 2014

It’s a tough context to be leading an INGO through, but INGOs have appeared ill prepared and slow to respond to the threats and opportunities, not realising how much they may need to change to respond to the fast evolving context and expectations. Large INGOs spend most of their energy exploiting present grant and contract business models, rather than exploring the opportunities to overcome poverty offered by such disruptive change. Their size and structures do not enable agility. They are too internally focused and self-referencing at a time when the world around them is changing so fast, and when political sands have shifted. Focussing on the internationalisation of structures and decision-making means large INGOs are ‘defeated by our own complexity’, as one INGO interviewee put it.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thinking amongst large INGOs at a time of such extraordinary disruptive change. The paper explores options for large INGOs, in terms of function and structure. After outlining large INGOs’ history, changing context, value and current thinking, it explores learning from others outside the development sector before suggesting the emerging options. It reflects on what’s encouraging and what’s stopping change and offers possible choices and pathways forwards….(More)”.

What is the true value of data? New series on the return on investment of data interventions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Case studies prepared by Jessica Espey and Hayden Dahmm for  SDSN TReNDS: “But what is the ROI of investing in data for altruistic means–e.g., for sustainable development?

Today, we are launching a series of case studies to answer this question in collaboration with the Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data. The ten examples we will profile range from earth observation data gathered via satellites to investments in national statistics systems, with costs from just a few hundred thousand dollars (US) per year to millions over decades.

The series includes efforts to revamp existing statistical systems. It also supports the growing movement to invest in less traditional approaches to data collection and analysis beyond statistical systems–such as through private sector data sources or emerging technologies enabled by the growth of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector.

Some highlights from the first five case studies–available now:

An SMS-based system called mTRAC, implemented in Uganda, has supported significant improvements in the country’s health system–including halving of response time to disease outbreaks and reducing medication stock-outs, the latter of which resulted in fewer malaria-related deaths.

NASA’s and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat program–satellites that provide imagery known as earth observation data–is enabling discoveries and interventions across the science and health sectors, and provided an estimated worldwide economic benefit as high as US$2.19 billion as of 2011.

BudgIT, a civil society organization making budget data in Nigeria more accessible to citizens through machine-readable PDFs and complementary online/offline campaigns, is empowering citizens to partake in the federal budget process.

International nonprofit BRAC is ensuring mothers and infants in the slums of Bangladesh are not left behind through a data-informed intervention combining social mapping, local censuses, and real-time data sharing. BRAC estimates that from 2008 to 2017, 1,087 maternal deaths were averted out of the 2,476 deaths that would have been expected based on national statistics.

Atlantic City police are developing new approaches to their patrolling, community engagement, and other activities through risk modeling based on crime and other data, resulting in reductions in homicides and shooting injuries (26 percent) and robberies (37 percent) in just the first year of implementation….(More)”.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jamie Susskind: “Future Politics confronts one of the most important questions of our time: how will digital technology transform politics and society? The great political debate of the last century was about how much of our collective life should be determined by the state and what should be left to the market and civil society. In the future, the question will be how far our lives should be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems — and on what terms?

Jamie Susskind argues that rapid and relentless innovation in a range of technologies — from artificial intelligence to virtual reality — will transform the way we live together. Calling for a fundamental change in the way we think about politics, he describes a world in which certain technologies and platforms, and those who control them, come to hold great power over us. Some will gather data about our lives, causing us to avoid conduct perceived as shameful, sinful, or wrong. Others will filter our perception of the world, choosing what we know, shaping what we think, affecting how we feel, and guiding how we act. Still others will force us to behave certain ways, like self-driving cars that refuse to drive over the speed limit.

Those who control these technologies — usually big tech firms and the state — will increasingly control us. They will set the limits of our liberty, decreeing what we may do and what is forbidden. Their algorithms will resolve vital questions of social justice, allocating social goods and sorting us into hierarchies of status and esteem. They will decide the future of democracy, causing it to flourish or decay.

A groundbreaking work of political analysis, Future Politics challenges readers to rethink what it means to be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, what it means for a political system to be just or democratic, and proposes ways in which we can — and must — regain control….(More)”.

Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Harris Gleckman: “Multistakeholder governance is proposed as the way forward in global governance. For some leaders in civil society and government who are frustrated with the lack of power of the UN system and multilateralism it is seen as an attractive alternative; others, particularly in the corporate world, see multistakeholder governance as offering a more direct hand and potentially a legitimate role in national and global governance.

This book examines how the development of multistakeholderism poses a challenge to multilateralism and democracy. Using a theoretical, historical perspective it describes how the debate on global governance evolved and what working principles of multilateralism are under threat. From a sociological perspective, the book identifies the organizational beliefs of multistakeholder groups and the likely change in the roles that leaders in government, civil society, and the private sector will face as they evolve into potential global governors. From a practical perspective, the book addresses the governance issues which organizations and individuals should assess before deciding to participate in or support a particular multistakeholder group.

Given the current emphasis on the participation of multiple actors in the Sustainable Development Goals, this book will have wide appeal across policy-making and professional sectors involved in negotiations and governance at all levels. It will also be essential reading for students studying applied governance….(More)”.