From Assessment to Practice: Action Planning for Governance Reform

Developing countries increasingly recognize the importance of monitoring governance in order to identify institutional vulnerabilities and take measures to strengthen the effectiveness of their governments. With that in mind, the World Bank Institute recently brought together 30 members of government and civil society from Benin, Burundi, Cameroun, and the DRC to learn from each other and the experiences of various countries with governance and anti-corruption initiatives -from assessment to implementation.

Through prolonged engagement via videoconference before meeting face to face in Kinshasa, DRC, the participants shared experiences about the challenges and opportunities they face for governance reform  and talked about how to harness the power of data to push reforms.

Daniel Kaufmann from WBI discussed the links between governance and growth and lessons learnt from an empirical perspective in Africa: even in a shorter term, African countries can benefit from improvements in governance and the control of corruption in the form of increases in income per capita, he pointed out.

Lucy Koechlin from the Basel Institute on Governance, while emphasizing that the factors that drive bad governance are country specific, talked about a systemic approach to governance reform within a country. One of the lessons she shared from her experiences in Africa was the importance of directly confronting the root causes of weak accountability institutions, rather than creating new ones. A much appreciated and clear focus of the workshop was the accent put on a South-South exchange of experiences with cases studies from contributors from Madagascar, Haiti, and Peru on the demand-side for accountability in their countries.

Participants felt the presentations gave them tools (not solutions) to improve collective work and action planning for reform. They were able to then draw on their diverse backgrounds and experiences to agree on priority sectors for governance reform in their countries – in most cases justice and public finances – and identify what action to take in those areas with specific challenges and opportunities. The emphasis was both on actions that could be implemented and yield significant results in the short to medium term as well as actions that would require a lot of resources but would be crucial for governance reform because of the impact they could have.

The hope at WBI is that this type of event plants the seeds for further collaboration among governance actors in Africa, and encourages further learning across the continent about successful governance reform initiatives that participants find relevant to the realities of their countries.