Regional : Evidence-Based and Strategic Country Knowledge Support

Public sector management / Public administration

The proposed small-scale knowledge and support technical assistance (TA) will test new approaches to provide strategic country-specific knowledge solutions that support the country's development priorities and strategies, and ADB's operations. The TA will operationalize the knowledge elements of ADB's Strategy 2030 and the President's Planning Directions for 2019 through strategic application of its research and analytical capabilities to strengthen national planning in the DMCs. This will also help improve business development within these countries based on enhanced investment quality and policy dialogue. The TA will implement a country-focused approach using the CPS as the main platform to define customized knowledge support, promote the use of innovative technologies, and deliver integrated solutions through cross-sector expertise.

Supplementary financing is proposed in June 2020, to add a new output to support the development of a user-centric platform for generating and sharing knowledge related to COVID-19 country experience and best practices which will be part of the country knowledge programming exercise for 2020 and 2021 in all the DMCs.

The Asia and the Pacific region has continued to undergo dramatic shifts since the past five decades with the number of middle-income countries growing. Compared with world aggregate data, the region has a much greater proportion of middle-income economies. However, the region faces the challenge of sustaining rapid growth after graduating from low to middle income and moving further to high income and also to bring about inclusive development. Asia and the Pacific remains home to over a billion people living in poverty, mostly in the lower middle-income economies. Developing Asia faces investment shortfalls and needs to invest $26 trillion from 2016 to 2030 or $1.7 trillion per year, if the region is to maintain its growth momentum, eradicate poverty, and respond to climate change. The typical challenges faced are rapid and unplanned urbanization, low productivity and competitiveness, regional disparities, demographic changes and persisting inequalities, shortfalls in economic diversification, and severe environmental degradation together with induced impacts from climate change.

Despite these common challenges, countries in Asia and the Pacific region are highly diverse, with differing governance systems constraining progressive, inclusive and sustainable growth. Therefore, while there are regional and sub-regional commonalities which offer opportunities for shared growth, applications of contextualized and differentiated knowledge solutions can significantly strengthen these efforts.

Several of ADB's developing member countries (DMCs) have defined national development plans and institutional reforms that aim to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) together with the commitments towards the nationally determined contributions as a result of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The progress so far in achieving the SDGs has been slow or even reversed, evident in extreme poverty reaching its lowest point in 2018. Achieving these goals require localized knowledge solutions, the success of which will depend on decision making capabilities of policy makers and implementation effectiveness of DMC policies.

Knowledge is central to development. Knowledge solutions should extend to high quality evidenced-based policy advice across DMCs' national priorities and sectors, strengthen their institutional capacity, and expand knowledge partnerships for testing ideas and sourcing different ways of thinking about critical development issues. Recent DMC knowledge consultations confirm that ADB's operations and its knowledge work needs to be more cohesive, leverage competitive advantage, seek better integration to national planning work, and for ADB to revisit its country programming and country partnership strategy (CPS) process together with alignment to the country operations business plans (COBP). ADB is well positioned to respond and support DMCs with its comparative advantage using differentiated approaches, such as (i) building and sustaining institutional capabilities; (ii) implementing evidence-based policy advice and shifts; and (iii) identifying and leveraging relevant innovations. The increasingly complex problems DMCs face will benefit from fostering partnerships with local, regional, and global think tanks, civil society organizations, academia, and those who can play a key role in (i) effectively implementing targeted innovative ideas; (ii) developing and implementing integrated solutions; (iii) providing regional knowledge solutions for shared gains; and (iv) facilitating knowledge transfer and good practices.

DMCs' institutional capacity to address development issues strengthened

Country-specific knowledge support for DMCs' development planning provided

Knowledge needs and capacity enhancement workshops conducted

New country knowledge support tool developed