Approaches to strengthening local government: lessons from Sri Lanka

This article sets out to describe recent approaches to strengthening local government within the framework of the World Bank's Municipal Management Programme (1985–95) in Sri Lanka. The article examines a number of innovations adopted within the programme that are of general relevance to the task of strengthening local government throughout the developing world. The article briefly outlines the background to the present system of local government showing that, whilst existing structures and functions remain relatively weak, a number of important innovations have been introduced to assist with the process of strengthening local resource mobilization and improving performance in service delivery, and enhancing certain aspects of accountability, particularly those areas concerned with the allocation and use of public funds. Since a number of these innovations have wide applicability to the process of local government strengthening and reform it is hoped that this article will demonstrate the practical relevance of certain key innovations for practitioners and policy makers elsewhere. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. Vol. 17 : 251–265 (1997). No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 0. No. of Refs: 13.     

Administration of pastoral development: lessons from three projects in Africa

Administrative problems are a major cause of the poor performance of pastoral development projects in Africa. This study focused on two aspects of project administration: policy development and organizational structure. From the literature, 11 actions in these 2 areas were identified that were supposed to enhance project performance. These 11 propositions were tested against evidence from 3 pastoral development projects in Africa funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Eight of these actions were strongly associated with improved project performance. These results become the basis for guidelines to improve design and implementation. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of party competition on budget outcomes: Empirical evidence from local governments in Spain

This paper investigates the link between local budget outcomes and the intensity of party competition, measured as the margin of victory obtained by the incumbent in the previous local election (i.e. the difference between the vote share and 50%). Two competing hypotheses are tested in the paper. On the one hand, the Leviathan government hypothesis suggests that the lower the intensity of party competition is, the greater is the increase in the size of the local public sector, irrespective of the ideology of the party in power. On the other hand, the Partisan government hypothesis suggests that the incumbent will find it easier to advance its platform when intensity of competition is low (i.e., parties on the left/right will increase/decrease the size of the local public sector when the intensity of the challenge from the opposition is low). These hypotheses are tested with information on spending, own revenues and deficit for more than 500 Spanish local governments over 8 years (1992–1999), and information on the results of two local electoral contests (1991 and 1995). The evidence favors the Partisan hypothesis over the Leviathan one. We found that, for left-wing governments, spending, taxes and deficits increased as the electoral margin increases; whereas, for right-wing governments, a greater margin of victory led to reductions in all these variables.     

Analyzing the dynamic complexity of development interventions: lessons from an irrigation experiment in Nepal

Improving irrigation systems in Asian countries has been a high priority for the allocation of international aid. Substantial funds have been allocated to adopt the “best practices” of hiring external water engineers to construct modern systems to replace those that farmers built. These expensive investments have infrequently led to long-term improvement in the operation of irrigation systems in Asia. In this article, we examine the process and impact of an innovative irrigation assistance project that was initially undertaken in Nepal in the mid-1980s. We analyze data obtained over three time periods related to changes in system structure and performance over time. We trace the unfolding patterns of improved engineering infrastructure across time depending on the way it interacts with other factors to affect long-term irrigation performance. We examine some of the key variables that are likely to affect the diverse and complex patterns of change. We also undertake analysis of the configural impact of core variables using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). We find that the initial and later investments in system infrastructure are only one factor that helps to generate short-term improvement. Unless farmers encourage local entrepreneurs and organize themselves, create their own rules or use sanctions, and augment their rules through collective action, infrastructure investment alone is not sufficient to achieve sustainable higher performance.     

Managing rural development in Botswana

Rural development in Botswana has proceeded using a non-directive approach. During the period 1973–1979 sectoral programmes for promoting development in rural areas have been administered by executive ministries, but, in addition, there has been non-executive machinery devoted to achieving a co-ordinated approach to development in rural areas. The emphasis in the work of the non-executive rural development unit was to promote communication and co-operation, and the success of the programme so far is partly attributed to this approach. The article points to additional lessons to be learnt from the experience of using this approach.     

Post-communist transition of local government in Hungary: Managing emergency social aid

Tensions are embedded in post-communist transitions. Public policies exhibit the disharmony between two different and often competing objectives: (1) developing a fully operational market economy within a democratic context and (2) maintaining social protections in the form of a wide array of social benefits. One challenge for post-communist regimes is the management of this tradeoff. This challenge is observed through an analysis of the administration of emergency social aid in Hungary. The analysis shows that post-communist transitions, as exemplified by the efforts to build local government capacity in Hungary, experience problems of sequencing. In particular, equity decisions are difficult to manage not only because they have their roots in socialist ideology and the policies of the former regime, but also because the increasing number of vulnerable populations makes welfare considerations a politically sensitive task now more than ever before. Meanwhile, the institutional processes needed to manage tensions are fluid and immature. Ultimately the success of the post-communist transition in Hungary (and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe) will be measured by the ability to build institutions that can manage and consolidate political pressures.     

Abandoned housing: Exploring lessons from baltimore

Abstract

Population loss and economic decline have resulted in thousands of abandoned homes in major U.S. cities. Although abandoned homes are symptomatic of other problems, they also contribute to neighborhood decline and frustrate revitalization. This article provides an overview of the national scope of abandoned housing and profiles Baltimore's strategy for addressing this problem.

Challenges in Baltimore's revitalization planning include the necessity of and financial requirements for a comprehensive approach and the difficulty of reaching consensus. Widespread property “flipping” hampers prevention. Efforts to acquire and demolish units are constrained by difficulties in tracking ownership, felons’ ownership of derelict units, and a shortage of staffing to process takings. Challenges in rehabilitating and marketing row houses include the need for subsidies to make units affordable to the most likely buyers, the omnipresence of lead paint, and the lack of foreign immigration. The article proposes a more strategic approach to the city's revitalization planning.     

Managing the development process: Community strategies in economic revitalization

This paper considers community strategies in economic revitalization. Guidelines are proposed for local economic development practitioners and as a framework for further research. Findings are based on extensive analysis and comparative study of economic development efforts in four medium-sized industrialized cities in the northeastern United States. The role of motivating, organizing, and diagnostic agents, including crisis situations, community based planning, and local development agencies, are highlighted. The analysis presents economic revitalization as an on-going activity requiring strong local leadership, competent local development institutions, and broad-based public and private sector participation.     

Managing development policy in Botswana: Implementing reforms for rapid change

In recent years, Botswana's international reputation as a nation with sound development management has been slightly tarnished and the country's government has become increasingly concerned about the declining performance of its development management machinery. This concern of the government has been translated into a series of reform measures designed to bring about rapid change. This article discusses and analyses those reform measures and their potential impact on the development management process in Botswana. It was determined that the reform measures were, for the most part, carefully crafted and are being purposefully implemented, showing the nation, once again, to be one with good governance.     

End user computing in Asian countries: Policy lessons for development administration

End user computing requires policy initiatives very different from those needed for computerization in order to deal with the specific issues of initiation, development and institutionalization. Microcomputers provide a service and not goods or savings and require an emphasis on the dynamics of the system, where both strategic issues and operational priorities have to be set. The process is organizational, rather than a technological or a planning exercise. It requires governments to guide the change through deliberate decision making. The objective has to be to obtain the support of users at different levels. In this paper Asian experiences are compared with Western experiences to determine a framework for looking at the process. The limited set of strategies for success have also been identified.     

Opening late-industrializing economies: lessons from Argentina and Australia

Economic liberalization has met substantial resistance in polities as different as Argentina and Australia. For these late industrializing nations the verb protect came to mean much more than just granting favors to industrialists. It also involved reducing the risks previously taken by societies engaged in economic modernization. After histories of vulnerability to external forces, they deliberately fostered collusion between the public and private sectors in an attempt to achieve benefits at the lowest cost for participants from all social classes. Consequently, economic liberalization now demands more than revisions in economic logic and the attitudes of industrialists, as recent attempts to reform economic strategy in both nations indicate. For three generations who were nurtured on these rent seeking notions of political economy, it requires a fundamental transformation of popular attitudes about the creation and distribution of private and public goods.This article is a substantially revised version of a paper I presented at the 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 4–8, 1988. I am especially grateful to Carlos Waisman who invited me to write the paper, to an anonymous reader for this journal who suggested many useful revisions, and to the journal's editor, William Ascher, for his leadership.     

Technology and rural development strategies in a small farmer organization: lessons from Bolivia for rural policy and practice

At a time when public sector agricultural and rural development administration is changing quite profoundly, and when farmer organizations are being asked to assume more significant roles in rural and agricultural development, in-depth analysis of these organizations is an important input into policy and programmatic discussions. This article is an analysis of one type of small farmer organization, a regional economic organization called El Ceibo in Bolivia. It is one of the most successful cases of small farmer organization around technology generation and product transformation and marketing in the Andes. El Ceibo has been able to open new markets for its products, adapt product transformation techniques appropriate for these markets, and develop technology in support of its marketing strategy. Factors favouring Ceibo's success include long-term financial and technical support from external agencies, isolated location, and a cash/export crop specialization. The impacts of Ceibo are significant, although it is not clear how far Ceibo's activities foster a more broadly based regional development in the Alto Beni area. The article also compares the strategies and impacts of economically based organizations such as El Ceibo with those of more traditional, representative and politically oriented small farmer organizations.     

National health insurance: Some lessons from the Canadian experience

In the current American debate over national health insurance an examination of the Canadian governmental experience is very instructive. Canada is enough like the United States to make the effects of Canadian health insurance policies rather like a large natural experiment. The Canadian experience—universal government health insurance administered by the ten provinces with some fiscal and policy variations—can be used to predict the impact in the United States of proposed national health insurance plans on the medical care system, and the reaction of mass publics and national policymakers to these effects.The central purpose of the Canadian national health insurance was to reduce and hopefully eliminate financial barriers to medical care. In this it succeeded. But it also produced results which Canadian policymakers never anticipated: essentially unexpected side-effects on cost, quality, organization, and manpower distribution of the particular national health insurance program adopted. It should be cause for concern, the article concludes, that most of the prominent American national health insurance proposals resemble the Canadian program in failing to provide a single level of government with both the means and incentives to curb the inflationary effects of national health insurance. The lesson from Canada is that unless the system has very strong anti-inflationary mechanisms and incentives built into it, national health insurance will feed the fires of medical inflation despite great formal governmental authority to control it.     

Designing policy resilience: lessons from the Affordable Care Act

Policy Sciences - Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not...     

The planning and management of integrated rural development in Drylands: Early lessons from Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands programmes

In Kenya a new generation of area-based, multisectoral rural development programmes has been started, targetted on the country's extensive arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL). By mid 1983, six such programmes were operational, each supported by a foreign donor and implemented by the Government of Kenya. Six years after the detailed planning of the first programme began, the record looks patchy. District level planning and co-ordination hold promise, and some programme activities are going well. However, problems of slow and cumbersome planning and mobilization, a lack of community involvement in planning, too few technical successes, and remote prospects for institutionalizing the programmes if and when expatriate support is withdrawn are apparent. Behind these problems lie a number of basic obstacles, including the structure and orientation of the government's lack of support for the drylands among politicians, and the technical difficulties of raising dryland production. Faced with these obstacles, the ASAL programmes look set to run into continuing problems. Overcoming them will depend on both the success of recent government moves to deconcentrate, and patient support from both the government and the donors. Historically the prospects for such support are poor.     

Education,identity, and community: lessons from Jewish emancipation

Why do some minority communities take up opportunities for education while others reject them? To shed light on this, we study the impact of Jewish Emancipation in nineteenth century Europe on patterns of education. In Germany, non-religious and Reform Jews dramatically increased their rates of education. In the less developed parts of Eastern Europe, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities imposed unprecedented restrictions on secular education and isolated themselves from society. Explaining this bifurcation requires a model of education that is different from the standard human capital approach. In our model, education not only confers economic benefits but also transmits values that undermine the cultural identity of minority groups. We show that it is individually rational for agents who benefit least from rising returns to education to respond by reducing their investment in education. Group-level sanctions for high levels of education piggyback upon this effect and amplify it.     

Results and lessons from Canada's PS2000

Canada has been a world leader in administrative reform, eager to experiment during turbulent times in public administration. Public Service 2000, an attempt to instill the Canadian public service into a people- and results-oriented management culture, has been widely heralded as among the boldest of recent Canadian administrative reforms. Results from implementing PS2000 were expected within a decade of its 1990 launch. Halfway through that timeframe, the results are surprising, complex, contradictory and paradoxical. For example, in the second year of implementation, the longer term solutions of PS2000 conflicted with a financial crisis demanding fast results, and PS2000 principles, throughout implementation, contradicted certain traditional public service values. Reflecting on their experience, individuals who participated in PS2000 confirmed lessons in the extant literature, and suggested lessons specific to Canadian circumstances. PS2000 has been an unavoidable and much-needed effort to reform the Canadian public service, though perhaps inevitably it fell short of expectation. Yet, inside opinion remains mixed, seeking rationalist explanations, and expressing dissatisfaction over the progress of implementation. PS2000 has been absorbed into a much broader plan to reinvent federal government administration and the role of the state in Canadian society. Continuing difference of opinion may well call for a more fundamental change in administrative and managerial doctrine, especially with respect to launching future comprehensive administrative reform projects.