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Implementing Legislative Strengthening Programs: Who is in Control?
Abstract
Over the last few decades, international development (known as Official Development Assistance or ODA) has been under attack for its lack of effectiveness. Critiques reflect two conceptual challenges, the nature of expert knowledge and the centrality of local ownership of development initiatives, bounded by the practical constraint of how politically controlled resources from bi‐lateral and international donors will be used. This article examines five implementation strategies, including their strengths and weakness, keyed to the level of control asserted by the donor agency. We illustrate our argument through a review of legislative strengthening projects most of which were funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID in the case of one of the models.
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... Because development ranges from the management of discrete projects (such as building construction or the distribution of humanitarian supplies) to complex efforts to support institutional development (such as improving the legal system or strengthening a parliament), we can build a comprehensive range of management practices that follow the evolving approaches to management. These extend from basic management strategies to result-based management to the most contemporary forms of adaptive management such as USAID's Collaborative Learning and Adaptation, Thinking and Working Politically and Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (e.g., Guinn and Straussman, 2018.) Here again, the students are broken up into smaller work groups and tasked with developing management plans for several illustrative case studies. ...
The article tackles the question, how to provide students with a comparative orientation to public administration. We eschew the older tradition of comparing major systems such British parliamentary system or French bureaucratic approaches to organizations’ structure. Rather, we seek to understand public administration in countries with different cultures, histories, and political regimes by focusing on international development. Our students are drawn from the Master of Public Administration degree program and the Master of International Affairs degree program. What unites them is an interest in international affairs and the desire to work internationally; international students take what they learn and apply it in their home countries. We ground the course on a model of international development with a strong focus on development in governance. We spend the first third of the class creating a development lens for understanding global practices in public management in which they use what they learned in the first part of the course to analyze a range of public management issues within governmental institutions and/or in working in the nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organization sectors. We use detailed case studies drawn from several case data banks to apply some of the core concepts of public administration such as leadership, stakeholder analysis, complexity, and implementation to development challenges such as fiscal issues, poverty alleviation, interorganizational collaboration, and human rights. We do this with a range of in-class exercises and assignments that students do out of class. One goal we have is to provide students with knowledge and skills to enhance their ability to work internationally since many have gone on to work for donor and various implementing organizations in international development. We believe that this is a reasonable measure of success of the approach we have taken to comparative public administration.
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry — that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. In addition, the flow of development resources and legitimacy without demonstrated improvements in performance undermines the impetus for effective action to build state capability or improve performance. This dynamic facilitates “capability traps” in which state capability stagnates, or even deteriorates, over long periods of time even though governments remain engaged in developmental rhetoric and continue to receive development resources. How can countries escape capability traps? We propose an approach, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), based on four core principles, each of which stands in sharp contrast with the standard approaches. First, PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting preconceived and packaged “best practice” solutions). Second, it seeks to create an authorizing environment for decision-making that encourages positive deviance and experimentation (as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them exactly as designed). Third, it embeds this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from ex post “evaluation”). Fourth, it actively engages broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant, and supportable (as opposed to a narrow set of external experts promoting the top-down diffusion of innovation).
Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, .good governance. is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different organizations and to different actors within these organizations. This study provides a review of donor approaches and discusses good governance as a concept. While methodological discussions are often esoteric, the study argues that this one has real world relevance to development policy because donor agencies regularly measure and assess the quality of governance, condition assistance on these measurements, seek to design evidence-based policies, and justify their focus on good governance partly on the basis of claims that better governance promotes economic development. The weakness of the good governance concept calls into question each of these projects. Future work would do well to disaggregate the concept of good governance and refocus attention and analysis on its various disaggregated components, as defined here (e.g., democracy, the rule of law, efficient public management).
Institutional reform or development happens when those within the organisation want that development and are willing to commit the time, effort and necessary resources under their control to support it. This may be referred to as the will for development. Over the years, a general strategy for legislative development has emerged in which the will for development is enlisted in one or more of three ways: mapping, incentivising, and creating demand. These efforts focus on identifying the will for development independent of the legislative strengthening project itself. This paper will explore how success in supporting the budget process by the United States Agency for International Development-funded Afghanistan Parliamentary Assistance Programme enhanced and/or created the will for further development within that legislature. The paper will demonstrate how budget process support can be used to engage a broader constituency of committees and civil society organisations, creating a self-sustaining reform dynamic to be referred to as the demand dynamic.
Critics of donor-funded democracy promotion claim that these programs are frequently designed to reproduce social and governmental models drawn from developed countries and imposed on the recipient country without regard to local conditions, with experts parachuted in to provide guidance based on international “best practices.” The critique focuses on first-generation development with a neutral, technical focus, whereas democracy promotion has evolved toward a more politically engaged approach to programming—what we label as second-generation and, more recently, third-generation development practices. We apply this distinction to the area of legislative strengthening (LS) by describing its history from the post–World War II period to the present and provide examples of LS projects to support the argument. The challenge is to combine valuable insights from best practices from decades of experience while adapting them through political engagement with local partners and with bilateral donors.
This book explains why many institutional reforms in developing countries have limited success and suggests ways to overcome these limits. The author argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.
Politics has become a central concern in development discourse, and yet the use of political analysis as a means for greater aid effectiveness remains limited and contested within development agencies. This article uses qualitative data from two governance "leaders" - the United Kingdom Department for International Development and the World Bank - to analyze the administrative hurdles facing the institutionalization of political analysis in aid bureaucracies. We find that programing, management, and training practices across headquarters and country offices remain largely untouched by a political analysis agenda which suffers from its identification with a small cross-national network of governance professionals.
Public sector reforms are commonplace in developing countries. Much of the literature about these reforms reflects on their failures. This paper asks about the successes and investigates which of two competing theories best explain why some reforms are positive deviants: “solution- and leader-driven change” (SLDC) and “problem-driven iterative adaptation” (PDIA). The theories are used to analyze data emerging from a case survey involving thirty cases from Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Society (ISS) program. The bulk of evidence from this study supports a PDIA explanation, but there is reason to believe that SLDC hypotheses also have value.
Both the donor community and scholars have created a cottage industry studying “fragile” states. International nongovernmental organizations that have developed indexes measuring corruption or governance have been unkind to Afghanistan. One index suggests a different and more optimistic story. The International Budget Partnership measures transparency every two years with its Open Budget Index. Afghanistan demonstrated dramatic improvement on this index between 2008 and 2012. The authors use the improvement in Afghanistan's transparency score as an entry point to explore how donors try to intervene and promote transparency as part of broader efforts in public financial management development and how legislative strengthening has also contributed to budget reform. The analysis offers a modest corrective to the overly pessimistic assessments of fragile states by showing that a fragile state can improve its budgetary transparency and enhance governance by strengthening the legislature's involvement in the budget process.
The sudden collapse of Mali's democracy in 2012 revealed the fragility of the state's legitimacy and authority. This article
argues that the decay of democracy was linked to the weakness of the country's legislature. Malian MPs collectively failed
to scrutinize an increasingly discredited executive and parliamentarians typically operated in isolation from the vast majority
of citizens. As a result, rising levels of popular discontent were rarely channelled into the formal political process, and
the interests that did enter the political arena were largely restricted to the personal support networks and electoral constituencies
of individual MPs. The prevalence of these particularistic interests undermined collective parliamentary scrutiny of matters
of national interest. By demonstrating the link between these failures and the collapse of Mali's democracy, this article
contributes to the expanding body of literature examining the limited role of African parliaments in processes of democratic
consolidation. In doing so it confirms the challenges that executive dominance poses to democratization, while highlighting
the importance of representative legislatures to Africa's democracies.
With the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall so recently upon us, efforts to take stock of the global state of democracy have been proliferating. Efforts to take stock of the state of democracy aid, by contrast, have been a good deal rarer. Even though this type of international assistance has a specific goal—to foster and advance democratization—criteria for assessing it are elusive. “Democracy aid” itself is a catchall term for an endeavor that has acquired enough moving parts to make drawing boundaries around it difficult. Reaching conclusions about methods or effects that apply broadly across an ever more diverse field is daunting.
Yet such a stocktaking, imperfect though it will inevitably be, is necessary. Since the late 1980s, democracy aid has evolved from a specialized niche into a substantial, well-institutionalized domain that affects political developments in almost every corner of the globe. A quarter-century ago, the field was thinly populated, principally by the institutes affiliated with each of the major German and U.S. political parties, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Latin America Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Foundation for Election Systems, and a few other organizations. Today, nearly every Western government gives some aid for democracy-building, whether through its foreign ministry, bilateral-aid agency, or other institutions.
Likewise, the family of political-party foundations and multi-party institutes that offer political aid across borders has expanded greatly. Numerous private U.S. and European foundations now fund programs to foster greater political openness and pluralism. An ever-growing range of transnational NGOs, both nonprofit “mission-driven” organizations and for-profit consulting firms, carry out programs aimed at strengthening democratic processes and institutions. Many multilateral organizations have entered the field as well. These include the UN Development Programme, the UN Democracy Fund, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and regional organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Organization of American States. Moreover, the governments of some of the larger “emerging democracies,” such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Turkey, are starting to use aid to support democratic change in their own respective neighborhoods.
With this striking growth in the number of actors has come a similar swelling of resources. In the late 1980s, less than US10 billion. This spending translates into thousands of projects that directly engage hundreds of thousands of people in the developing and post-communist worlds. The expansion of democracy aid also entails a widening reach. Two and a half decades ago, most democracy aid flowed to Latin America and a few Asian countries, such as the Philippines and Taiwan. In the intervening years, it has spread around the world, following the democratic wave as it washed across Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Asia, and the Middle East. Today, at least some democracy aid reaches every country that has moved away from authoritarian rule, as well as most countries still living under dictatorship. When new political transitions look promising, as they did in Burma and Tunisia several years back, a scramble occurs as organizations trip over one another in search of ways to bring democracy aid to bear.
Despite this impressive growth, many practitioners and observers wonder whether the field is adopting smarter methods over time and achieving better results, or just repeating itself in an endless loop of set approaches and inflated but never-fulfilled expectations. These lingering doubts come at a time when democracy aid is becoming increasingly controversial, a target for powerholders in many parts of the world who attack it as a form of subversion that deserves to be met with harsh countermeasures. Democracy’s travails in many countries where it has long held sway, plus the waning of the optimism that accompanied the spread of democracy when the “third wave” was at its height, fuel serious questioning in diverse quarters about whether democracy support is even a legitimate enterprise. In short, as democracy aid reaches the quarter-century mark it remains far...
If the object of developing and developed world leaders is to uplift their peoples continually, then it is essential to measure approximations of actual service deliveries (what we ought to mean by “governance”), not to rate nations impressionistically according to the perceived quality of their operations, their perceived impartiality (as per Rothstein), the extent of their bureaucratic autonomy (as per Fukuyama and others), or their capacity to coax or coerce citizens. Only in that positive manner can we distinguish the governments that are producing abundant political goods (i.e., good governance) from those that no longer are, or never did.
In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task: countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even a moderate capability country like India, and millennia to reach the capability of Singapore. Short-term programmatic efforts to build administrative capability in these countries are thus unlikely to be able to demonstrate actual success, yet billions of dollars continue to be spent on such activities. What techniques enable states to ‘buy time’ to enable reforms to work, to mask non-accomplishment, or actively to resist or deflect the internal and external pressures for improvement? How do donor and recipient countries manage to engage in the logics of ‘development’ for so long and yet consistently acquire so little administrative capability? We document two such techniques: (a) systemic isomorphic mimicry, wherein the outward forms (appearances, structures) of functional states and organisations elsewhere are adopted to camouflage a persistent lack of function; and (b) premature load bearing, in which indigenous learning, the legitimacy of change and the support of key political constituencies are undercut by the routine placement of highly unrealistic expectations on fledging systems. We conclude with some suggestions for sabotaging these techniques.
Although legislative performance is uneven across the African continent, the legislature is emerging as a “player” in some countries. It has begun to initiate and modify laws to a degree never seen during the era of neopatrimonial rule or even in the early years after the return of multiparty politics. And in some countries (Kenya, Malawi, and Nigeria), though not in others (Namibia and Uganda), it has blocked presidents from changing the constitution to repeal limits on presidential terms. In short, legislatures in Africa are beginning to matter. That said, there is no uniformity across Africa and we are only beginning to understand and explain the variations.
In order to assess the real impact of different governmental arrangements on democratization, we must penetrate beyond general categories for classifying constitutional systems and measure the power of specific institutions. This essay presents a new instrument for measuring the powers of national legislatures across different constitutional frameworks that examines the postcommunist countries' Freedom House scores and ratings on a Parliamentary Powers Index at the constitutional moment and beyond. The evidence shows that the strength of the national legislature may be an institutional key to democratization.
Many externally motivated public sector reforms produce less change than expected. This article argues that we should expect limited reform results in respect of certain organizational attributes. Applying institutional theory on isomorphism, the argument is simply that reforms are harder where they influence organizational characteristics that (i) are difficult to observe externally, (ii) are core to the organization, and (iii) involve actors with whom the externally defined change agenda is unlikely to resonate normatively. These arguments are tested in an analysis of Public Financial Management (PFM) reform in Africa, where evidence is supportive. The article contributes to public management literature, and comparative studies in particular, by applying a well-suited theory to the study of public sector change. The approach and findings should be of particular interest to the development community, shedding light on why reforms routinely underperform—in PFM and beyond, extending to topics like externally driven nation building.
Short courses, books, and articles exhort administrators to make decisions more methodically, but there has been little analysis of the decision-making process now used by public administrators. The usual process is investigated here-and generally defended against proposals for more "scientific" methods. Decisions of individual administrators, of course, must be integrated with decisions of others to form the mosaic of public policy. This integration of individual decisions has become the major concern of organization theory, and the way individuals make decisions necessarily affects the way those decisions are best meshed with others'. In addition, decision-making method relates to allocation of decision-making responsibility-who should make what decision. More "scientific" decision-making also is discussed in this issue: "Tools for Decision-Making in Resources Planning."
Donors are paying more attention to politics, and some are applying political analysis to specific aspects of development practice. But this is having little influence on mainstream debates about aid, and donors are not questioning their implicit assumptions about how development happens. There are powerful intellectual and institutional barriers to recognising that politics is central to the whole development process. This matters because, without a change in their mental models, donors will not invest in understanding local political dynamics, or give priority to strategically important but difficult issues. If they did so they would discover some very practical opportunities for progress. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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