Evaluation

Printer-friendly Version  Send to a Friend  Give Feedback

Sustainability of Policy Reforms through Selected Advisory Technical Assistance
Completed 2001

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been concerned with the effectiveness of its advisory technical assistance (TA) operations for some time. The study focused on the broad theme of policy reforms in the power and water sectors as supported by advisory TAs.

   Summary of Findings

The study concluded that barring a few isolated success stories, the contribution of advisory TAs to a sustainable policy reform remains below its potential. Generic problems and issues include:

• The overall environment for reforms was only mildly supportive in four developing member countries (DMCs), and in Sri Lanka, there was strong resistance to reforms designed to lead to a greater role for the private sector.
  
• Executing agency capacity (i.e. human resources) in the power sector is weak in Bhutan. In Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Philippines, substantial training would be required to move to a competitive market structure. Compared to the power sector, capacity is a constraint in the water sector in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Philippines.
  
• The approach to reforms in the context of the design of most advisory TAs was issue based, rather than derived from a clear programmatic or goal-oriented (i.e., results-based) approach to sector development.
  
• The ownership of advisory TAs was limited or intermittent in most cases.
  
• The overall approach to training and capacity building was found to be ad hoc-most training and capacity-building activities were not supported by needs analysis in terms of what was required for sector reforms.
  
• Cross-sector learning between power and water sectors, either within ADB or in DMCs, was limited.

The study identified five major building blocks of sustainable policy reforms: legal and regulatory frameworks, improved market structures, sector governance, effective human capacity, and building constituencies for reform. Evaluating individual sector reform processes against these building blocks, it was found that in Bhutan, the paucity of effective human capacity and institutional development was a major constraint to the sustainability of policy reform. Sector governance has been a key concern to sustainability in Bangladesh and Indonesia. In Sri Lanka, much more work is needed to build constituencies for reform and for improved market structure. In the Philippines, the process of reform will remain stalled until further progress is made to improve the market structure and put in place an appropriate legal framework.

   Recommendations

Looking forward, four key issues need to be addressed for sustainable policy reforms:

• Policy reforms need to be treated as a dynamic process in the context of a given sector-that is, a path from the present to the future, not a one-off policy change or a set of fixed institutional changes.



• Generating ownership of the reform process and advisory TAs is important. Increasingly, more and more analytical tools are available to assess ownership on the ground.



• Effectiveness of advisory TAs in future will depend largely on the ability of ADB to allocate the required resources. The present staff allocation, as well as skills mix is grossly inadequate to generate a commensurate return from advisory TAs.



• Greater accountability for results in advisory TAs needs to be addressed at multiple levels: (a) training and sensitizing staff to new approaches to institutional development, (b) building multidisciplinary teams for reforms, (c) securing better performance of consultants, and (d) strengthening the quality control mechanisms for advisory TAs.