Governance

Lessons Learned from the Implementation of Projects with Governance Objectives

Since 1995, ADB has amassed insights in designing and implementing programs and projects with governance objectives.

Reforms should be appropriately sized and sequenced.

Governments' need to focusing reform efforts on what is feasible.Reform programs should be carefully tailored to implementation capacity and available human and financial resources. It is better to succeed with a few key initiatives rather than to get bogged down due to overambition.

Improving governance requires commitment.

Governments need to build constituencies and engender a commonality of support for reforms. More focus needs to be put on the influence and power and interests of different stakeholders. To ensure the necessary support for change it is necessary for governments to appoint individuals with vision and ability to spearhead such efforts. Governance reforms require shared commitments and ownership across the political spectrum at both operating and policy levels, including technical experts, the opposition politicians and the individual parliamentarians.

Governance reforms require adequate resources.

Resources are needed to pay for costs directly related to the reforms, such as transition costs such as severance pay and new information systems. Additional resources are needed to monitor progress, garner support for changeensure flexibility, and to impose sufficient "clout" to ensure effective implementation by multiple agencies.

Importing recommended practices should be done cautiously.

'Readiness for change' needs to be assessed for the lead organizations. Organizational culture, management style, staff and systems' capacities, internal processes, and external linkages all require careful analysis before embarking on radical redesign. of an operating environment. Systems that work well in industrialized countries cannot often be directly transferred without gradual and sequenced change customized to the degree of 'readiness'.

Capacity building requires broad-based interventions, appreciative of complex sets of factors influencing institutional development.

Effective capacity building needs to be based on in-depthsound institutional analysis, and may require training, introduction of information technology systems, and introduction of new functions, procedures and work methods. Organizational 're-engineering' must be understood as a complex set of factors that include an assessment of the capacity of staff and their senior management to learn new ideas, behaviors, rule systems and adapt them to the existing culture of the institution.