There are limits to what best practices and textbook solutions can do to improve the delivery of services in areas like education, health, and water¡ªbut collaboration and cross-functional approaches to identify bottlenecks and devise customized ¡°best fit¡± solutions can make a tremendous difference.
That was the consensus coming out of a special session on tackling governance constraints in health, education, and water sponsored by the Financial Management Umbrella Program (FMUP) and the Global Financing Facility (GFF) on June 5.
The session looked at some of the challenges faced in these sectors and focused on the need for cross-functional collaboration by experts within the World Bank as well as cross-sector collaboration by government officials to improve the delivery of services. The session featured two panels with the first one focused on understanding the governance constraints to service delivery and the second dedicated to ways that different teams at the World Bank can work together with their government counterparts to address these governance challenges.
The panels benefited from the contributions of lead specialists, senior economists, and directors across the World Bank, including Arturo Herrera Gutierrez (Governance Global Practice), Saroj Kumar Jha (Water Global Practice), and Dena Ringold (Strategy and Operations of the Human Development Practice). Gul Bano, a senior finance official from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in Pakistan and Prof. Brian Levy of Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies also shared their insights.
The first session explored the ways that governance and sector experts can and do work together to collectively identify and address challenges, particularly bottlenecks to service delivery. Collaboration works well when both governance and sector experts focus on concrete outcomes as a way to resolve possible tensions. Strong sector knowledge and governance skills are needed to use existing evidence of what works and what does not in a particular sector, without presupposing a supportive institutional environment that might actually not exist ¨C and thus needs to be understood.
Panelists discussed the limits of top/down approaches and the need to focus on empowering local stakeholders from across sectors to devise and execute solutions.
¡°All too often, the deployment of best practices presupposes an institutional environment that is very different from the messy governance realities,¡± said Professor Levy. ¡°What has sometimes worked are more horizontal initiatives, peer-to-peer learning rather than top/down efforts, support for leadership teams rather than bureaucratic controls, and working to empower local-level stakeholders to carve out islands of effectiveness to take hold.¡±
The panelists also shared anecdotes on failed and successful experiences and lessons learned from them. Relevant cases from very different contexts and regions were illustrated
For example, Pakistan¡¯s KP province has had recent experience using a collaborative approach in addressing bottlenecks evaluating issues together and then co-creating a customized set of solutions. The reform team in KP brought together representatives from health, education, and finance to identify a pathway to devolve adequate spending responsibility to schools and health facilities without undermining funding and its control. They were able to not only identify the main bottlenecks they are facing but develop tailored solutions. They were able to reach a consensus around needed policy, which was turned into an actionable policy note on needed reforms for improving the management of health and education facilities.
¡°You need to understand each other¡¯s perspective and that doesn¡¯t happen unless you sit at the same table,¡± said one of the panelists, Agnes Couffinhal, the Health Financing Program lead in the Global Health Unit at the World Bank. ¡°You need to be solutions-oriented and not think about the textbook. And you need to be very pragmatic.¡±
In Tunisia, a similar approach is being used, in this case for the development of a public financial management (PFM) action plan. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health were involved in the process of determining the PFM bottlenecks in order to identify the constraints that will have a direct impact on service delivery, mainly the low autonomy of local service providers in managing funds and lack of clear goals for teachers to contribute to the achievement of sectoral strategic objectives. The reform team is not starting with a pre-defined set of best practices but with a strong, joint diagnosis of key public financial management bottlenecks and main service delivery problems. ľ¹ÏÓ°Ôº has provided welcomed support to this exercise, not as ¡°experts¡± in the traditional sense but as methodological and technical facilitators.
Once solutions are reached, the job is not done, reported Gul Bano, Additional Secretary in the Finance Department in Pakistan¡¯s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
¡°The policy practitioner needs to be vigilant of the fact that today these reforms have been resolved but they are still open to all sorts of threats ¨C political, cultural, and social,¡± she said.
ľ¹ÏÓ°Ôº¡¯s GovEnable approach, supported by FMUP and GFF, was also introduced at the session ¨C and is being used in both KP and Tunisia, with facilitation support from the World Bank. GovEnable builds existing tools inspired by the Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation or PDIA and similar frameworks to provide an organized and documented set of processes and templates that can help design locally led solutions.
Following the session, there were two clinics for World Bank team leaders and consultants to orient them with the approach and to teach them facilitation techniques for deploying it.