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Institutional Analysis Toolkit for Safety Net Interventions

Author: I Mathauer
Date: 2004
Size: 79 pages (220 KB)

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Summary

In the wake of the economic crisis in the late 1990s, safety nets that mitigate the effects of poverty and other risks on vulnerable households have experienced renewed interest. What are the institutional challenges relating to safety net interventions? How can institutional analysis propose solutions to enable better outcomes? This paper from the World Bank provides a toolkit on the institutional capacity of the major components of formal safety net interventions and provides guidelines on key performance issues.

Often, those countries most in need of safety nets are the ones that can least afford them and have the least capacity to implement them. Prioritising safety nets strategy is not just a technical decision, but also the reflection of the political economy situation. The toolkit provides key questions for assessing institutional and organisational capacity in order to derive suitable approaches to institutional (re)design and capacity strengthening for effective programme delivery.

It is widely recognised that institutions do matter for development, since they influence the quality of policymaking, as well as the efficiency of service delivery. Safety net interventions involve a range of key characteristics and implications relating to institutional design:

• Given the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, safety net interventions are usually multi-sectoral , spread across various ministries. This calls for co-ordination at the policy and programme level.
• Substantial institutional-organisational pluralism exists in delivering safety net interventions with the involvement of the public and private sectors as well as NGOs and religious organisations.
• Ministries of social services often play a marginalised role due to lack of resources. The contribution of social services and safety nets to a poverty alleviation strategy is not sufficiently recognised.
• Safety net interventions target the most vulnerable groups that are weak, marginalised and usually not organised, hence collective action around service delivery issues is infrequent.
• Safety nets imply decentralised service delivery, therefore the nature of communities and community structures are important in evaluating the potential for community targeting measures and the role of community participation.

The three components of the toolkit are: institutional assessment questionnaires to identify an overview of the existing safety net system, institutional design considerations, and institutional design and capacity strengthening recommendations. The toolkit provides key questions on issues of institutional and organisational capacity to better understand the causes of poor performance from an institutional perspective and propose the optimal institutional arrangements for existing or planned programmes.

• Any institutional capacity assessment should be undertaken as early as possible during programme planning, ideally when the safety net core components are being identified and before the actual design of safety net components.
• It is necessary to undertake regular institutional assessments during implementation and evaluation.
• The toolkit must be seen as a set of guiding questions that does not anticipate each and every situation or provide questions for all possible circumstances.
• The institutional analysis should be as participatory as possible ensuring that people affected are drawn in, otherwise a lack of ownership and identification with the process will make institutional redesign and capacity strengthening hard to implement.

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Source: Mathauer, I., 2004, ‘Institutional Analysis Toolkit for Safety Net Interventions’, World Bank, Social Protection Discussion Paper No. 0418
Author: The World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org