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Where Are 'Pockets' of Effective Agencies Likely in Weak Governance States and Why? A Propositional Inventory

Author: David Leonard
Date: 2008
Size: 33 pages (228 KB)

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Summary

How and why are "pockets of productivity" able to emerge in states where governance is generally weak? This paper, published by the Institute of Development Studies, inventories the array of available hypotheses and condenses them into five sets of mega-hypotheses. However, there will not necessarily be a neat chain of causation to help explain and expand these productive pockets of governance and development.

Comprehensive civil service reform is rarely accomplished with ease; at best, the process is laborious, uneven and fraught with controversy. Most explanations of failed capacity building efforts have hinged on making technical improvements to particular interventions. However, the focus of the effort may itself be the problem, as any agency's capacity to reform is related to the nature of its mandate and to larger political concerns. "Pocket of productivity" refers to a public organisation which effectively carries out its mission in serving the public good, despite an atmosphere of ineffective or corrupt governance.

The results of reviewing the literature on this phenomenon, and consolidating both the internal and external factors leading to success, produced the following differing mega-hypotheses:

• Managerial attributes and leadership capacity largely determine an organisation's productivity, rather than function or political context. Attention should be directed towards specific practices, such as a personnel system based on actual performance.
• Function and the associated technology play the critical role, marking out readily identifiable benefits and incentives, and leading to organisational autonomy.
• Pockets of productivity depend on a combination of costs and benefits which they generate for politically relevant groups in any given situation. The right process for enhancing results can transcend other aspects of the political context.
• Organisational leadership must be responsive, but not beholden, to political leadership in order to carve out a pocket of productivity. The nature of the relevant political institutions will shape what is achievable.
• The basic political economy surrounding a given organisation will play a dominant role in determining how productive that organisation can ultimately be.

It is likely that these mega factors are nested, with the later ones framing and driving the earlier ones. Despite the difficulty of adequately testing these hypotheses, and the inevitable presence of unknown factors, some general implications can be drawn concerning pockets of productivity. For example, particular government-related organisations, filling certain kinds of functions and operating in certain contexts, are easier to turn into pockets of productivity than others. Furthermore:

• Productivity is most easily achieved where there is little conflict over goals and methods and a clear tie between organisational work and desired outcomes. Without these conditions, political pressures may stymie managerial initiative rather than incentivise it.
• An organisation's leadership should be respected professionally and should be externally grounded in order to resist pressures of politicisation.
• There is a special difficulty in attempting to predict or create something as unusual as a pocket of productivity. The contextual variables influencing the development of such scenarios are dynamic, such that static analyses of the surrounding political economy is likely to fail.

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Source: Leonard D., 2008, 'Where Are 'Pockets' of Effective Agencies Likely in Weak Governance States and Why? A Propositional Inventory', Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton UK
Organisation: Institute of Development Studies , http://www.ids.ac.uk