Latest Resources
Briefing | Malawi | More than just ‘demand’: Malawi’s public-service community scorecard
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Governance and MDG, Public Administration, Civil SocietyCommunity-based monitoring instruments, such as scorecards, are used increasingly to complement and reinforce conventional mechanisms to strengthen accountability and performance in public-service delivery. While they have been backed by the international community, there is limited evidence on how they work in practice and what conditions they need to be effective. This Project Briefing seeks...
When is Community-Based Monitoring Effective? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Primary Health in Uganda
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyA growing number of experts argue that more emphasis must be placed on strengthening beneficiary control that is, strengthening providers accountability to citizens/clients. This report tests whether social heterogeneity in Uganda can explain why some communities managed to push for better health service delivery while others did not. While there is evidence that such an approach can...
Monitoring and Evaluation when Politics Matters l Background Paper
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Civil SocietyEveryone agrees that there is a crucial role for research and evidence in development policy-making. But the apparently simple claim that policy decisions should be based upon clear and rigorous evidence of value and effectiveness masks the inherently political – and normative - nature of how we define what counts as ‘valid evidence’, and what this means for policy decisions. This is the...
Exploiting the Poor: Bureaucratic Corruption and Poverty in Africa
Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyCorruption is a major source of slow development in Africa – the poorest region of the world. While extant research has focused on the causes and consequences of corruption at the macro-level, less effort has been devoted to understanding the micro-foundation of corruption, as well as the mechanisms through which poverty may be related to corruption and bribery. In this paper, we develop a simple...
National Reconciliation and Transitional Justice Audit (Beyond Juba Project: Uganda)
Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyBeyond Juba Project About the Audit: As the first phase of the Beyond Juba Project (2007-2011) was winding up, the Refugee Law Project embarked on a countrywide conflict-mapping exercise dubbed: the National Reconciliation and Transitional Justice Audit (NR&TJ Audit) to document all major current and past conflicts and their legacies in Uganda. The main...
The last mile in analysing well-being and poverty: Indices of Social Development
Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyDevelopment practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize the importance of informal institutions - such as norms of cooperation, non-discrimination, or the role of community oversight in the management of investment activities – in affecting well-being, poverty, and even economic growth. While there have been many country- or region-specific studies that explore relationships between such...
To Measure is to Know? A Comparative Analysis of Gender Indices
Article / Working Paper, Governance and Gender, Civil SocietyThe paper presents a comparative analysis of five cross country composite gender indices. Although there is a relatively high correlation between the indices, the overlap of underlying indicators is low. Country rankings, both at the top and at the bottom have parallels but are quite distinct. The differences are explained in two ways: methodologically and theoretically. The methodological...
IBP Working Paper 3: Political Determinants of Fiscal Transparency
Article / Working Paper, Civil SocietyEmpirical evidence on the beneficial effects of fiscal transparency ranges from improved budgetary outcomes, to lower sovereign borrowing costs and decreased corruption. Despite this, hardly any effort has been invested in exploring the determinants of fiscal transparency. Using a new 85-country dataset, we focus on two important sources of domestic demand for open budgeting: citizens and...
A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Demand and Supply Side Education Interventions:The Case of Progresa in Mexico
Article / Working Paper, Governance and MDG, Latin America and the Carribean, Civil SocietyThis paper is concerned with the issue of the most cost-effective way of improving access to education for poor households in developing countries. We consider two alternatives: (1) extensive expansion of the school system (i.e., bringing education to the poor) and (2) subsidizing investment in education by the poor (i.e., bringing the poor to the education system). To this end, we evaluate the...
Institutional arrangements for corruption prevention: Considerations for the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Corruption Article 6
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Civil SocietyPresentation delivered at the workshop on national anti-corruption strategies in Oslo 2009.