“The first third of your campaign is money, money, money. The second third is money, money, money. The final is votes, press, and money.”
- Rahm Emanuel, an American politician who serves as the 55th Mayor of Chicago and previously served as Representative of the 5th Congressional District in Illinois from 2003-2009 and as US President Obama's White House Chief of Staff from 2009-2010.
The components of a bureaucracy are defined not by individuals but by positions that make up the structure
A common notion in public policy is that policy-making and implementation are divorced from each other, in the sense that politics surrounds decision-making activities (to be carried out by the elected political leadership) while implementation is an administrative activity (to be handled by bureaucracies). However, researchers have found that such distinctions are not helpful in understanding policy implementation in developing countries.
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
5 Best Practices for Using Technology in Disaster Response
The Institute for Technology and Social Change
Working in humanitarian aid and disaster relief across several countries, I first joined the TechChange community as a student in the Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management online course in January 2012, and will soon be guiding discussions as a facilitator for the next round of the course that begins March 17, 2014. Since TechChange has offered this emergency management course six times since 2011, I’ve enjoyed stepping up my participation from student, to guest speaker, tech simulation demonstrator, to now a facilitator.In my opinion, disaster management is a field where nobody is really an expert in that different people have varied areas of expertise. A facilitated TechChange course like TC103 is an opportunity to get people of different backgrounds together, which is especially valuable in a field like disaster management, which evolves so quickly and can be tough to keep track of. Here are five lessons I have learned over the course of seven years of working in disaster response across Haiti, Liberia, Myanmar, Mali, and most recently the Philippines
Generate decent jobs 'or a billion people will remain in extreme poverty'
The Guardian
Up to a billion people will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 unless countries focus on inequalities and confront social, economic and cultural forces that block their escape or pull them back into impoverishment, a major report warns. The report (pdf) by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) asserts that many people may rise above the poverty line of $1.25 a day, only to tumble back when they are hit by a combination or sequence of shocks such as drought, illness and insecurity or conflict.
The broad objective of the World Bank’s India Country Partnership Strategy Report (CPS) for the period 2013-2017 is to support poverty reduction and shared prosperity in India. The Report states that between 2005 and 2010, India’s share of global GDP increased from 1.8 to 2.7% and 53 million people were lifted out of poverty. But it also states that with population growth, it has proved difficult to reduce the absolute number of poor at a rapid pace and 400 million Indians still live in poverty. Each of the seven low income states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan; Uttar Pradesh) and seven special category states (Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Sikkim, Uttrakhand) have poverty rates that are higher than that of the more advanced states. The low income states, where a large majority of the poorest 200 million Indians reside, are a priority for the World Bank Country Strategy funding during 2013-2017 (estimated to be $ 5 billion annually with 60 percent lending through direct financing of state projects of which half will go to low income and special category states).
India, both in the above mentioned and its advanced states (e.g. Punjab, Haryana, Kerala) is undergoing a massive rural- urban transformation- one of the largest in the 21st century. For the first time since independence, India has seen a greater absolute growth in urban population. The number of towns has increased from about 5000 in 2001 to 8,000 in 2011 and some 53 cities have a population exceeding one million. Today 30.1 percent of the population lives in urban areas and the share is expected to rise to 50% in the next 20 years (with urban India expected to generate 70% of its GDP by 2030). Though villages vastly outnumber towns in India (660,000 villages as per Census 2011), the construct of these villages is changing as the economy grows.
New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.
Mobile technology is redefining our lives and making it increasingly connected. From health and education to transportation and the environment, the proliferation of mobile communication and a 'connected life' is now well established. The examples provided in this infographic only scratch the surface of the impact that mobile devices will have on society over the next five years for both developed and developing markets.
It is 10 years since the World Bank launched its landmark World Development Report (WDR), Making Services Work For Poor People. A decade later, what have we learnt about the science and politics of service delivery – and what are the emerging issues that will shape future priorities? The recent anniversary Conference in Washington D.C., co-hosted by ODI and the World Bank, with support from the UK Department for International Development, discussed new developments, data and trends in public service delivery since 2004 across a range of service delivery sectors.
In the conference report, ODI experts share their reflections on the conference and on future directions in five key areas for service delivery: information and incentives, behavioral economics and social norms, financing service delivery, fragile states and the politics of delivery. This article by Leni Wild talks about information and incentives.
There is still a gap to be filled between having more information and figuring out whether and how services improve. However, February’s joint ODI and World Bank Conference marking ten years since the World Development Report (WDR) on Making Services Work for Poor People flagged up where progress has been made, and what we are learning about the role information can – and cannot – play here.
Ten years after the World Development Report 2004, the ODI’s Marta Foresti reflects on the past decade and implications for the future
Why do so many countries still fail to deliver adequate services to their citizens? And why does this problem persist even in countries with rapid economic growth and relatively robust institutions or policies?
This was the problem addressed by the World Bank’s ground-breaking 2004 World Development Report (WDR) Making Services Work for Poor People. At its core was the recognition that politics and accountability are vital to improve services and that aid donors ignore this at their peril. Ten years on, these issues are still at the heart of the development agenda, as discussed at the anniversary conference organised jointly by ODI and the World Bank in late February.
As much as this was a moment to celebrate the influence of the WDR 2004 on a decade of development thinking and practice, it also highlighted just how far we have to go before every citizen around the world has access to good quality basic services such as education, health, water and electricity.
So what follows, Snowden? On the evidence so far, not a great deal. The biggest heist in the history of intelligence was supposed to change the world – to expose the calumnies of the secret state and redraw the boundaries in favour of individual liberty. For all the sound and fury, little has changed.”
- Philip Stephens, associate editor and chief political commentator of the Financial Times.
The World Bank Group is developing a strategy to more systematically mainstream citizen engagement in Bank Group-supported operations with the goal of improving their results. The strategy will build on experience from existing efforts and highlight additional context-specific opportunities to engage with citizens and seek beneficiary feedback.
The Bank would like to learn from the wealth of global experience in citizen engagement. Specifically, what works, when, why and how? Please share your experience through this short online survey. The team working on this would very much appreciate your input, which will help inform the strategy.
For more information, visit the consultations website. If you have any questions, please send an e-mail to citizenengagement@worldbankgroup.org
This is the third in our series of posts on evidence and decision-making; also posted on Heather’s blog. Here are Part 1 and Part 2
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In our last post, we wrote about factors – evidence and otherwise – influencing decision-making about development programmes. To do so, we have considered the premise of an agency deciding whether to continue or scale a given programme after piloting it and including an accompanying evaluation commissioned explicitly to inform that decision. This is a potential ‘ideal case’ of evidence-informed decision-making. Yet, the role of evidence in informing decisions is often unclear in practice.
What is clear is that transparent parameters for making decisions about how to allocate resources following a pilot may improve the legitimacy of those decisions. We have started, and continue in this post, to explore whether decision-making deliberations can be shaped ex ante so that, regardless of the outcome, stakeholders feel it was arrived at fairly. Such pre-commitment to the process of deliberation could carve out a specific role for evidence in decision-making. Clarifying the role of evidence would inform what types of questions decision-makers need answered and with what kinds of data, as we discussed here.
