Scott Fritzen

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, nestled in the foothills of the
Alps, has a storied past. It was here that the Green Revolution and the Global Aids Vaccine initiatives were conceptualised. In June this year, the Center opened its doors to 20 representatives from policy schools around the world over four days – including Dean Kishore Mahbubani, Professor Kanti Bajpai and myself from the LKY School – to discuss the ‘future of global public policy education’. Delegates grappled with the question: does our increasingly globalised world demand a fundamentally new kind of public policy education?

Purpose – The paper explores an emerging challenge for large public-sector bureaucracies: developing information and performance measurement systems that support anti-corruption efforts.
Design – An analytical framework linking functions and contexts of performance measurement to anti-corruption requirements is presented. The framework is used to explore a case study of the World Bank’s ongoing efforts to strengthen anti-corruption information systems in Indonesia.
Findings – A range of organizations are increasingly turning to performance measurement systems to fulfill several functions related to organizational integrity: to hold organization’s accountable for reaching publicly stated standards of fiduciary responsibility and corruption control; to identify vulnerable operational points in multi-faceted public enterprises; and to facilitate organizational learning regarding ‘what works’. Yet corruption is difficult to measure, and corruption vulnerabilities often arise from informal practices, insufficient incentives for enforcement or adherence to standards, and managerial blindspots. Enhanced information systems need to be coupled with effective and multi-directional accountability arrangements in order for performance measurement to contribute effectively to corruption control.
Practical implications – Improved information systems and a reassessment of managerial incentives and attitudes are both essential in order to reduce organizational vulnerability to corruption and to the public backlash that follows in the wake of corruption scandals.
Originality/value – Focus on an emerging area of performance management likely to gain increasing visibility as large bureaucracies attempt to institutionalize public commitments to high anti-corruption standards

Attempts to ‘regulate’ civil service personnel- to hold bureaucrats accountable, whether to politicians, the people, professional standards or the rule of law- are as old as the politician-bureaucrat relationship itself. Politicians and citizens throughout Southeast Asia are calling for greater bureaucratic accountability in a variety of country settings: one-party states and emerging democracies, and in countries with capable as well as rudimentary bureaucracies. This paper presents an analytical framework that unpacks the idioms used in common accountability reforms applied in Southeast Asian countries into four categories – ‘rules’, ‘watchdogs’, ‘culture’ and ‘re-engineering’ – and relates reform selection and implementation to country governance characteristics. The framework is used to identify  reform opportunities, constraints and likely trajectories in the diverse Southeast Asian context.

Developing countries that were early, enthusiastic adopters of Primary Health Care often developed an extensive – but eventually dilapidated and under-utilized – network of public clinics at the grassroots. As paradigms and investment patterns of health sector reform have shifted, the question of what role these public clinics can meaningfully play, and how best to revitalize them, has become important in a number of countries. This paper evaluates the strategy taken by, and outcomes of, a major attempt in Vietnam to revitalize the grassroots infrastructure of primary health care against the backdrop of the country’s economic transition. The project’s substantial supply-side investments in infrastructure led to marginal increases in utilization and the quality of preventive health services  provided by the centers. But because the project failed to take adequate stock of broader, public sector-wide trends and reforms over the transition, the investments had little impact on the incentives, accountability patterns and capacities of clinic staff and the local authorities. Such institutional factors are heavily implicated, in Vietnam as elsewhere, in the substantial and often increasing disparities in service access and quality that continue to afflict transitional health sectors.

This paper examines how various poverty assessment modalities serve to strengthen the governance capacities necessary to target the poor. Large-scale surveys and qualitative, 'bottom-up' assessments both have shortcomings in this regard. A 'multi-level' synthesis would in theory link a unified indicator framework (such as the Millennium Development Goals) to localized situation assessments and facilitate multi-sectoral efforts to target the poor. Case studies of actual efforts to do this from Vietnam and Burma highlight the way in which the governance context of a country must be taken into account when designing such efforts.

There is little doubt that globalization, however defined, has hit the field of
professional policy education in the twenty years since APPAM’s Hiltonhead conference on the future of policy education first took stock of a largely American landscape. Despite the title of this session, the relevant development is not merely the accretion of public policy schools and programs around the world. It is the recognition of international dimensions of the policy education enterprise that, if taken seriously (and participants in this discussion argued that it must), promises to change the way we conduct business on multiple levels. This report of the lively discussion generated in the wake of Iris Geva-May and her coauthors’ stimulating conference paper1 explores why and how.

The study of the health workforce has gained in prominence in recent years, as the dynamic interconnections between human resource issues and health system effectiveness have come into sharper focus. This paper reviews lessons relating to strategic management challenges emerging from the growing literature in this area. Workforce issues are strategic: they affect overall system performance as well as the feasibility and sustainability of health reforms. Viewing workforce issues strategically forces health authorities to confront the yawning gaps between policy and implementation in many developing countries.

Lessons emerge in four areas. Once concerns imbalances in workforce structure, whether from a functional specialization, geographical or facility lens. These imbalances pose a strategic challenge in that authorities must attempt to steer workforce distribution over time using a limited range of policy tools. A second group of lessons concerns the difficulties of central-level steering of the health workforce, often critically weak due to the lack of proper information systems and the complexities of public sector decentralization and service commercialization trends affecting the grassroots. A third cluster examines worker capacity and motivation, often shaped in developing countries as much by the informal norms and incentives as by formal attempts to support workers or to hold them accountable. Finally, a range of reforms centering on service contracting and improvements to human resource management are emerging. Since these have as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition some flexibility in personnel practices, recent trends towards the sharing of such functions with local authorities are promising. The paper identifies a number of current lines of productive research, focusing on the relationship between health policy reforms and the local institutional environments in which the workforce, both public and private, is deployed.

Decentralization occupies an important space in debates over public-sector reform in doi moi Vietnam. This paper assesses the changing distribution of roles, responsibilities and resources across levels of government over the past decade. Vietnam is incrementally transfering greater administrative and fiscal responsibilities to the provincial level. In addition, the Communist Party is attempting to prevent local corruption through a much touted “grassroots democratization” initiative. Yet such moves towards decentralization, however cautious, are  problematic in terms of their bureacratic politics and potential impacts on poverty. Incentives for bureacratic actors and local leaders to transfer meaningful control downwards are weak or non-existent within the  current governance structure, which centralizes political power and emphasizes hierarchical, sectoral controls over decision-making and resources. And decentralization trends are exacerbating the weak administrative and fiscal capacities of poorer provinces, threatening to reinforce rather than reduce Vietnam’s widening regional and rural-urban disparities. A more proactice role for the center in redistributing resources, providing technical support and establishing a facilitative policy framework will be crucial if decentralization is to contribute towards improved socioeconomic outcomes in Vietnam’s poorest regions.

This paper explores the tensions and opportunities surrounding Vietnam’s attempt to reach the goals of rapid economic growth while also being a Socialist “fair society.” It does so by looking at the phenomenon of inequality in the process of economic transition and development.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to inform government policy choices – to examine how the actions of the government can have an impact, in a market economy context, on the achievement of equitable, balanced development.

International donors have attempted to contribute to, and indeed influence, the overall tenor of socioeconomic and governance-related reforms in Vietnam. They have done so in a number of ways: directly supporting policy research, stablishing forums for debate of developmental issues with government counterparts, funding projects on administrative and judiciary reform and central level capacity building, and providing direct financial and sometimes indirect support for ‘indigenous’ NGOs, primarily development service organizations working as contractors for particular development projects. This paper examines another modality through which donors sought to influence administrative reform over the heady ‘development decade’ of the 1990s – donor support for rural development projects conceived as ‘policy experiments’ (Rondinelli 1983). Though diverse in sectoral focus, these projects commonly attempted to introduce local institutional arrangements promoting greater responsiveness and accountability of local governments to rural communities as a whole, or to particular sub-groups such as smallholder farmers. To do so, local organizations or grassroots groups were typically established as new ways of organizing the rural populace to demand, plan for, access or provide services underpinning rural development and poverty alleviation. “Local development groups” (LDGs) is the name I give to groups comprised of farmers and other end-users of project services (or representatives they choose) that were formed in the process of implementing particular development projects. This paper probes the experience of these development projects and LDGs over approximately the last ten years. It depicts how projects funded by a wide range of donors became an important part of the institutional landscape in many areas of Vietnam, leaving a significant mark on many sectors related to rural  development. Five sections follow this introduction. The first examines how changing donor roles interacted with institutional developments to produce an opportunity for projects to influence policy. Section two presents a theoretical framework with which to assess LDGs and the policy experiments in which they were embedded, which section three applies the framework to a sample of 15 donor projects operational over the 1990s in Vietnam. Section four presents more qualitative detail on a few of the higher-impact projects. The final section concludes with  implications for donors and the study of local institutional change in Vietnam.

Area-based national programs such as 135 (poorest commune program) have formally adopted decentralization and local participation as key strategies. This accords with the spirit of the Grassroots Democratization Decree. But how will these principles be translated into an improved local planning and implementation process? What constraints will have to be overcome for this to happen? These questions are still very much open, and to date there have been few studies focusing specifically on them. This policy paper analyzes current constraints on, and makes recommendations regarding, the participation of local communities and local government in poverty-related national programs. The study has resulted in four separate papers, of which the current one is the synthesis. Each of these is quite long and goes into considerable descriptive detail; the interested reader is encouraged to contact UNDP Hanoi (Social Development Unit) for copies.