When ownership makes the difference: Lessons from Zambia’s first Program-for-Results

Ask any development practitioner what makes a reform program succeed, and “government ownership” will almost certainly come up. It is one of the most widely accepted principles in development practice. But what does ownership look like when a program is running, and how do you know it is real?

Working on the Zambia Devolution Support Program (ZDSP), our team found ourselves confronting a more demanding form of ownership than anticipated. Not just design ownership, in which governments shape a program’s objectives from the outset, but organizational ownership, where an institution restructures the way it works to pursue a program’s goals, treating new activities not as an added obligation but as part of its core business. In this blog, we share some thoughts and lessons learned that may assist other Program-for-Results programs, particularly those seeking to ensure that institutional reforms translate into better services, stronger local economies, and more opportunities for people and businesses.

The crowding out problem

When a reform program is managed as a separate track, it creates what is called a “crowding out environment.” Staff are asked to deliver on program requirements on top of their existing responsibilities, and reform activities become an additional layer rather than a different way of working. Over time, the program competes with the institution’s core business for the same people, at the same time.

This is not a capacity problem. It is a business model problem. Adding more technical assistance or Project Implementation Unit staff will not solve it. The harder question is: how should the institution change the way it works for this program to become an integral part of what it does?

What did ZDSP do differently?

Funded through IDA, the World Bank Group’s very first Program-for-Results (PforR) in Zambia is designed to strengthen the financing, institutional performance, and accountability of local authorities across the country—helping local governments deliver the basic services and enabling environment that communities and businesses need to grow, invest, and create jobs. Early in implementation, the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) managed the program competently, but as a separate track.

The question that surfaced during Zambia’s 2025 Country Portfolio Performance Review was not about capacity or technical design. It was organizational: how could MLGRD change how it worked because of it?

MLGRD’s response was to use its own performance management architecture as the vehicle for change. The ministry embedded ZDSP’s objectives and indicators directly into the performance agreements of relevant departmental directors. This single step had structural consequences that went well beyond program management.

What this institutional shift means

Embedding program objectives into departmental performance agreements is a mainstreaming mechanism. It means that Bank-funded program objectives become part of the institution's own accountability framework—visible, trackable, and owned at the level of individual departments and managers.

Each department is then accountable not just for activities, but for results; not just for spending, but for what that spending achieves for people, firms, and communities. The program’s results framework and the institution’s own performance logic become, in effect, one unified framework.

This is what organizational ownership looks like in practice. And it reveals what parallel management tends to hide: without reviewing the business model, reform activities will always add an additional layer of tasks. The crowding out environment is not an accident of poor coordination, but the predictable consequence of asking an institution to do more without asking it to work differently.

As our World Bank Country Manager for Zambia, Achim Fock puts it: “Programs leave a lasting impact not when they run smoothly alongside institutions, but when they change how those institutions work.”

Three lessons for PforR teams that we learnt through implementation of the ZDSP

• The trigger matters. The 2025 Country Portfolio Performance Review created a structured moment to surface the organizational question—one that might not have emerged through routine supervision. Portfolio reviews can be more than performance assessments; they can open a different kind of conversation about how a program is being absorbed into the institution.
• The fix doesn’t have to be in the program. When parallel management is the problem, the most effective response may be to work with the government’s own accountability architecture rather than adjusting the program’s structure. This requires understanding how the institution manages its own performance and finding the entry point where program objectives can be anchored within it.
• Engage early. Organizational ownership doesn’t happen automatically. A deliberate conversation about the business model, ideally before parallel management becomes entrenched, is a precondition for sustainable reform.

Whether ZDSP’s approach develops into a replicable model remains to be seen. But the question it raises is worth putting to any PforR team: is the program being managed through the institution, or alongside it? The answer may be one of the more consequential factors in determining what the program ultimately leaves behind.

What has your experience been with government ownership in practice? We would welcome your thoughts in the comments below.

*A draft of this content was created with Gemini 3.1 Pro, a generative AL tool, and vetted by World Bank staff for accuracy.