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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

Public Sector Management

Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation: From Pilots to Scaled-up Implementation

Submitted by Alfredo on Mon, 2009-09-14 08:29

On Wednesday, September 16, the World Bank's e-Development Thematic Group will host the workshop "Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation. From Pilots to Scale-up Implementation."  The workshop features six sessions that will touch on the transformative role that mobile technology can play in five thematic sessions, including governance.  We have blogged before about examples and the potential of mobile phones for advancing the governance agenda in the development community, so the workshop will be an interesting opportunity to continue this dialogue.

You can follow the event via live webcast.  You can register for the webcast here.  Below you can find more details about the event. 

 

Tackling deforestation and climate change, not without good governance

Submitted by Alfredo on Tue, 2009-07-07 09:27

Good governance has received little attention in the global agenda for climate change.  Yet, it seems that it is making its way, at least on climate change issues related to deforestation and forest degradation -which account for about 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

A study recently published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IEED) states that "in many areas where deforestation and degradation are at their highest, governance is weak and is an underlying cause of deforestation and degradation."

Governance Matters 2009: Learning From Over a Decade of the Worldwide Governance Indicators

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2009-06-29 11:15

Today we are releasing the report Governance Matters VIII, which includes the new update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI).   Now collaborating from the Brookings Institution, I continue to take part in this research project with my former World Bank colleagues Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi.

Twittering your way to improved governance

Submitted by Tanya on Fri, 2009-06-05 16:47

San Francisco is setting the US standard for using technology to improve accountability.  The Mayor recently announced the launch of a 311 Call Center through Twitter. Check out the site here.  San Francisco is the first US city to roll out a major service such as this on Twitter.

How can technology in public procurement bring about improved governance?

Submitted by Kashmira on Mon, 2009-05-04 18:36

-Jointly submitted by Kashmira Daruwalla and Tanya Gupta

Experts have identified procurement as one of the areas most prone to corruption in the public sector.  Corruption in public contracting can take many forms, including bribery, deception (fraud) or simple abuse, affects the efficiency of public spending and donors' resources and creates waste.  Corruption is widespread in public procurement and service delivery programs.  In a study in Uganda, Reinikka and Svensson compared central government data on public grants to schools from a survey of school officials to find what fraction of grants were ultimately received by schools.  They found that schools received only 13 percent of central government spending on the program, over the period 1991–1995.  Most schools received nothing and the evidence suggested that most of the funds leaked out of the public system through procurement fraud.

In a different randomized field experiment in Indonesia, Olken found that 24% of the funds for a road project had been stolen, after comparing reported expenditure and actual expenditure. 

e-democracies: will Digg-like social networks pave the way for participatory decision-making?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-04-24 18:16

The hype about social networking sites doesn't seem to come to an end.  If it's not Facebook, it's MySpace, and now it's Twitter.  Even though some people are still reluctant to believe in the functionality of some of these web 2.0 applications, it's a matter of years before they become a tool that we have to use on a daily basis, as it happened with email and the internet not so many years ago. 

In this entry, I will follow-up on one of Tanya's three points mentioned in her last entry -namely, participation-, and will make the case for Digg, one of some applications for social bookmarking that allow its users to share, comment and vote on their preferred bookmarks.  From my perspective, these participatory features can give us a glimpse of how decision making processes in the public sector might look like in the not-very-remote future.

E-Government: moving beyond services

Submitted by Tanya on Wed, 2009-04-22 17:56

A recent exchange between the members of the W3C group on e-government and the content of the last GSA’s newsletter on Transparency and Open Government, coordinated by Lisa Nelson, got me thinking about how narrowly we often conceive the scope of e-government, and in the process ignore important aspects of governance. 

To most people, e-government is all about better and improved services flowing from the government to the citizen (G2C).  Improvements in service provision usually imply more efficiency in the delivery and services of better quality.  However, the conversion of manual processes to automated processes -which is how most G2C implementation is done- discourages us from using new technologies able to change the paradigm of the relationship between citizens and their government.

Dirty Water: Joining forces to curb corruption in the Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Submitted by Maria on Tue, 2009-04-07 09:12

World Water Day was celebrated on March 22 and to bid farewell to a month full of water related activities, the World Bank Institute and Transparency International launched the book “Improving Transparency, Integrity, and Accountability in Water Supply and Sanitation” in an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on April 1, 2009.

More than 1 billion people around the world live without access to safe, potable water, in part because of poor governance and corruption. To raise awareness on issues such as embezzlement of funds, bribes for access to illegal water connections, manipulation of meter counters, and collusion in public contracts, the World Bank Institute, together with Transparency International, developed this book to provide a useful tool for diagnosing, analyzing, and remedying systemic corruption in the water supply and sanitation sectors.

This books stems from the twin capacity building programs carried out by WBI and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) in Honduras and Nicaragua in September 2007, previously discussed at this blog.

From m-euphoria to m-governance, thinking about the potential of mobile technology

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-03-27 10:55

The hype about mobile technology for development work is going on the rise.  It's not for granted.  More than four billion worldwide mobile subscriptions -with the fastest growth trend in developing countries-, sounds like a great opportunity to reach and interact with broader groups of people, including the poor.  Actually, mobile penetration in Africa has expanded from about 2 to 28 subscribers (per 100 inhabitants) since 2000 (see graph at the bottom). 

This looks like a great scenario, but putting aside the m-euphoria let's explore the role for mobile technology in the field of governance.

Capture and the Financial Crisis

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2009-03-09 17:41

There is no 'theory-independent' way of viewing reality.  We see and analyze world events through our own prism, shaped and tinted by upbringing, experiences, training and professional field of expertise. So it is not surprising that when it comes to the many explanations given for the current financial crisis, they differ greatly.