Public Accountability and Transparency Institutions Monitoring Concept Note

Transcription

1 Public Accountability and Transparency Institutions Monitoring Concept Note I. Background Despite the prominence of governance and anti-corruption in the Bank's agenda 1 and the tremendous progress that has been made in measuring governance and corruption 2, far less effort has been made to systematically collect information on the specific policies and institutions that comprise governance and contribute to the control of corruption. 3 To be sure, significant recent efforts have been made to develop more disaggregated, actionable indicators of particular aspects of governance, and public administration in particular. 4 But gaps remain to be filled. Comprehensive, detailed and regularly updated data on institutional mechanisms for enhancing transparency and accountability of public administrations and public officials is still lacking, as is similar information on civil service management institutions. Asset declaration, conflict of interest, freedom of information and immunity protections for high public officials all appear in the UN Convention on Corruption. The Bank s Executive Directors and others consulted on the GAC strategy have consistently emphasized the importance of a wider range of actionable indicators, and some of the GAC consultations in client countries specifically mentioned the need for new or better laws in the areas that will be covered by this project. The Global Integrity Index 5 provides the most detailed monitoring of such accountability and transparency institutions currently available, and the Bank is helping to expand the country coverage of that monitoring effort. But their coverage of the elements of each such institution is considerably less detailed than what is proposed in this project. 1 See, e.g., Strengthening Bank Group Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption (The World Bank, Washington, DC: September 2006); Helping Countries Combat Corruption: The Role of the World Bank (The World Bank, Washington, DC: September 1997); Anticorruption in Transition: Who is Succeeding and Why? (The World Bank, Washington, DC: 2006); Reforming Public Institutions and Strengthening Governance: A World Bank Strategy (R ) (The World Bank, Washington, DC: November 2000); Mainstreaming Anticorruption Activities in World Bank Assistance A Review of Progress Since 1997 OED Report No (The World Bank, Washington, DC: July 14, 2004). 2 See, e.g., Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, Governance Matters V: Governance Indicators for World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (The World Bank, Washington, D.C.: September 2006). ; Transparency International (TI). Global Corruption Report (2003); (2005); (2006). Berlin, Germany: TI. 3 An exception, upon which the work in this project will build is: Dorhoi, Ioana Monica, Anti-corruption Strategies and Fighting Corruption in Central and Eastern Europe, Ph.D. dissertation (Michigan State University, MI: July 2005). 4 See, e.g., Doing Business (The World Bank, Washington, DC: periodic): ; Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) Program: ontentmdk: ~menupk:344278~pagepk:210082~pipk:210098~thesitepk:275851,00.html ; Global Integrity, Global Integrity Index : ; Maxwell School s Government Performance Project: ; American Bar Association-Central and Eastern Europe Law Institute, Judicial Reform Index : 5 Global Integrity, Global Integrity Index : 04/12/2007 1Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

2 Moreover, this project will compile the actual legislation governing each of these transparency and accountability institutions in each country, and provide systematic summaries of the provisions of those laws. This information is not available in a consolidated database from any other existing source. II. Objectives This project aims to develop a cost-effective resource base and set of actionable indicators for various institutions (rules of the game) that contribute to transparency and accountability within a country s public administration. It is an important element of PRMPS s efforts to develop resources that enhance our knowledge and information base on comparative administrative arrangements and practices. It is also an element of PRMPS s efforts to develop and make more widely available actionable indicators on core anti-corruption and governance institutions. In an initial stage, the project will cover four distinct sets of institutional mechanisms for enhancing transparency and accountability of public administrations and public officials: asset disclosure, conflict of interest, freedom of information, and immunity provisions. Additional institutions will be addressed in a second stage; namely, civil service management. Future stages are intended to include more areas of accountability including procurement or financial control and audit. For each of these institutions, the project will generate three inter-related products that should be helpful for assessing the quality of each of those institutional mechanisms: (i) an inventory of the relevant primary legislation; (ii) a standardized summary of key elements of that legislative framework; and (iii) a detailed set of indices of the quality of the legislative framework governing that institution, as well as detailed scoring of all good practice criteria upon which those indices are based, to allow users to construct indices consistent with their own priors regarding appropriate weighting of the underlying good practice criteria. The database will be developed through collection from primary sources (laws and regulations) and secondary sources such as reports, evaluations, and interviews with at least 3 in-country experts (and specifically two from NGOs, USAID, UNDP, etc. and one representative of the government). To ensure the quality of the data, the standardized summary of information compiled, based on each instrument, will also be sent for a twoweek country review to World Bank s country offices. This data gathering, by itself, will not address questions as to which aspects of each of these transparency and accountability institutions contribute most significantly to either accountability or the performance of governments and their public administrations. Rather, it will provide a rich data set which, when combined with other data on accountability and the performance of governments and their public administrations, should facilitate systematic research on precisely those linkages. The inventory of legislation governing each of the covered countries, as well as the summaries of key provisions of that legislation, should prove valuable to Bank staff and others working on governance issues in particular countries covered by this initiative. Annual updates will ensure that this rich database is always reasonably up to date. In addition, the detailed indices, as well as the raw data behind them, should facilitate ready comparison of the legal framework governing these institutions across countries. The 04/12/2007 2Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

3 data will be provided in a way that enables users to both drill down to particular aspects of any given institution s legal framework, as well as to aggregate up to construct indices tailored to their own interests and priors. These features should make this database attractive to people working on particular countries as well as to analysts and researchers interested in comparative administrative practices in such accountability and transparency institutions. The initial stage of the project will focus solely on what we will refer to as in law aspects of each of these institutional mechanisms; i.e., the formal rules and assignments of responsibilities and authority for implementation of those rules, as specified in the legal framework. During a second stage, the project will expand its scope to include in practice measurements for each of the covered institutions; i.e., data that facilitates assessment of how well each of these institutional mechanisms actually functions. The development of these databases and indices must allow their cost-effective updating on a periodic basis (e.g., annually) if they are to stand a reasonable chance of being monitored on a sustainable basis. Accordingly, the methodology pursued in this project is designed to ensure that (i) during the development phase, collecting the data required for the above three products for the four institutional mechanisms covered in Stage I could be accomplished at a cost of about $1500 per country, (ii) the cost of adding a new country during the roll-out phase of Stage II would be about $1000; while (iii) the cost of updating the data for a country each year would be about $750. This would mean that annual updating of such a database for the initial four transparency institutions for about 150 countries would cost less than $115,000. Unit costs of expanding the sets of institutions to be covered, as part of the Stage II expansion of scope to include civil service management and anticorruption agencies, would be similar, and probably moderately lower, as there should be some economies of scale in the data collection effort. The second stage will expand the scope of this work in four ways, here identified in decreasing order of priority for the project: (i) further refining of the questionnaire s in law criteria; (ii) increasing country coverage; (iii) adding institutional coverage, and (iv) adding in practice measurements. III. Description of the Approach The project will be undertaken in two stages an initial stage and an expanded scope stage. The first stage is, essentially, a test of the approach. As such, it will include a development phase and will roll out the instruments it develops in a limited number of middle and low income countries 78, including 53 IDA countries. 6 The second stage will include both a development phase, for the additional set of institutions to be covered, and a roll-out phase, to capture a larger sample of countries around 150, including updating the data for the 78 countries surveyed during the initial stage of the project. The expanded sample will also include Part I countries. Stage I 6 For the list of countries in the initial round, see Annex A. 04/12/2007 3Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

4 During the initial stage, the project will develop a preliminary Public Accountability Mechanisms database. That database will cover 78 countries, providing information and indicators developed for four distinct sets of institutional mechanisms for enhancing transparency and accountability of public administrations and public officials: asset disclosure, conflict of interest, freedom of information, and immunity provisions. Freedom of information and asset disclosure are often addressed in Bank policy-based lending as is conflict of interest, albeit to a somewhat smaller extent. Immunity is often cited by observers is a key roadblock to high-level accountability so that it justifies the inclusion of immunity as one of the four areas. 7 This stage will focus solely on what we will refer to as in law aspects of each of these institutional mechanisms; i.e., the formal rules and assignments of responsibilities and authority for implementation of those rules, as specified in the legal framework. Data will be compiled for 78 middle and low income countries, including 53 IDA countries, as of July The data to be compiled and actionable indicators will be defined for each of these four institutions, the instrument for distilling the information will be designed, the data required to provide the needed information will be collected for the initial wave of countries, and the information will be coded and verified, using the instrument. The final output will include three distinct products: primary legislation governing that institution in each covered country, as well as secondary sources that provide descriptions, analyses and assessments of that legislation and that institution in each country; standardized summary of key elements of that legislative framework, detailed set of indices of the quality of the legislative framework governing that institution, which provide both an overall index of the quality of that legislative framework, as well as drill-down indices for each of its key elements. To ensure that the indices are intuitively straightforward, they will measure the percentage of good practice criteria that are satisfied along each dimension being measured (see Annex C). Moreover, the scoring on each good practice criterion will be posted, thereby allowing users to create indices consistent with their own priors regarding weights for each criterion. The inventory of primary legislation will compile that legislation as it existed as of July 2006 in each sampled country, as well as secondary sources that provide analysis and assessments of that legislation in each of the surveyed countries. The standardized summary of key features of the legal framework governing each of these four institutions, as well as the detailed set of indicators, will be built around the following criteria: 8 Asset disclosure criteria include: coverage 9 ; comprehensiveness of declarations; frequency of submission, penalties for non-compliance, types of enforcement 7 Open Society Institute, (2001 & 2002); EU Commission Annual Reports ( ), Transparency International, (2002). 8 Detailed information on each instrument s criteria can be found in Annex B, while Annex C provides a detailed specification of these indices and how each criteria will be scored. 9 I.e., which officials are required to submit a mandatory declaration. 04/12/2007 4Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

5 mechanisms; depth of verification of declarations, as well as public access to such declarations. Conflict of interest criteria include: definition of conflict of interest, types of conflict of interest situations to be disclosed, whether declarations are mandatory, declaration format, declaration comprehensiveness; rules and mechanisms for identifying and resolving conflicts of interest, as well as public access to such records. Freedom of information criteria include: documents to be disclosed, disclosure procedures, exemptions from disclosure requirements, tests to override nondisclosure, types of enforcement mechanisms, time and cost of access, as well as penalties for non-application of legislation. Immunity criteria include: types of officials covered, types and duration of immunity, as well as procedures and assignment of authority for lifting immunity. The database has been and will continue to be developed through collection from primary sources (laws and regulations) and secondary sources such as reports, evaluations, and interviews with at least 3 in-country experts (and specifically two from NGOs, USAID, UNDP, etc. and one representative of the government). To ensure the quality of the data, the standardized summary of information compiled, based on each instrument, will also be sent for a two-week country review to World Bank s country offices. The inventories, standardized summaries and indices will all be made available on the World Bank s Administrative and Civil Service Reform (ACSR) website. These will be posted in a way designed to ensure ease of access and exploration by users. Stage I will be completed by March Stage II The second stage will expand the scope of this work in four ways, here identified in decreasing order of priority for the project: (i) further refining of the questionnaire s in law criteria; (ii) increasing country coverage; (iii) adding institutional coverage, and (iv) adding in practice measurements. o Refining in law criteria: Feedback from reviewers will be employed to improve the in law criteria prior to undertaking a second round of datagathering. o Broadened country coverage: Country coverage will be increased from 78 to approximately 150. o Broadened institutional coverage: Data will be compiled and indicators developed for two additional sets of institutions that impact public sector transparency and accountability; namely, civil service management and anti-corruption agencies. o In practice criteria added: In addition, this stage will develop, test and deploy instruments for gathering data and assessing how well each of these institutional mechanisms actually functions; i.e., the project will develop, test and deploy what we will refer to as in practice criteria and indicators. 04/12/2007 5Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

6 The broadened country coverage will be accomplished by replicating the initial survey in an additional 72 countries, and by updating the survey in the 78 original countries. The broadened institutional coverage will be accomplished through the same steps as were applied to the initial four transparency and accountability institutions during Stage I. Finally, the addition of in practice criteria will involve the design of instruments for capturing in practice characteristics of each of the six institutions covered by Stage II. Table 1 provides an illustration of possible in practice criteria. Stage II will be completed by March The result of these two stages will be a comprehensive and web-friendly inventory of legislation and institutional arrangements on (i) the four specific transparency and accountability mechanisms (asset disclosure, conflict of interest, freedom of information, and ministerial immunity), and (ii) two other important public administration institutions (civil service management and anticorruption policies and agencies). That data will be complemented with an analytic framework that facilitates evaluation of the impacts, results, and challenges that reforms of these transparency and accountability institutions face, so as to help IDA countries, Bank staff, and other interested parties to better understand comparatively what countries have done, as well as how they could improve legislation and institutional arrangements in each of these four areas. Finally, this work will yield actionable indicators across 150 countries by March 2008 for each of these six institutions, addressing both in law and in practice dimensions of each. Table 1: Sample In Practice Criteria Organizational independence (or is the agency protected from political interference?) Is the formal status independent, vs. executive agency Head is appointed/elected to enforce organizational independence? (elected/appointed by Parliament/Government) Head of the agency is protected from removal without relevant justification and due process? Makes regular reports to the government/parliament Budgetary independence: Who propose agency s budget? Does Government have final say on agency s budget proposal forwarded to Parliament? Administrative independence Employees enjoy civil servants status Appointments to the agency are based on professional criteria Recruitment and selection process requires open competition Agency has professional, full-time staff Agency received regular funding Types of authority allocated 04/12/2007 6Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

7 Investigates on own initiative Responsive Investigation Gather intelligence Coordinate Monitoring Advisory opinions Biding opinions Penalize (directly or indirectly) Education Dissemination The data gathered will be posted on the Bank s Governance website in a user-friendly format. This will include, besides the three sets of information described above (laws, summaries of legal provisions, and detailed ratings), a paper describing the methodology and providing some simple analysis of summary statistics from the data base. In addition, the project team will undertake dissemination activities to enhance awareness by Bank staff of this resource; including at least one Brown Bag Lunch presentation. Team This project will be undertaken by Gary J. Reid, Lead Public Sector Management Specialist (PRMPS/ECSPE), who will serve as Task Team Leader (TTL), and Monica Dorhoi (PRMPS). Ms. Dorhoi is particularly well qualified for this work, as she developed a similar set of indicators for a number of Central and Eastern European Countries in her recent dissertation Iona Monica Dorhoi, Anti-corruption Strategies and Fighting Corruption in Central and Eastern Europe, Ph.D. dissertation (Michigan State University, MI: July 2005). 04/12/2007 7Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc

8 Annex A. Public Accountability Mechanisms: A Comparative Review of 78 Countries Countries ECA Albania Lithuania (25) Armenia FYR Macedonia Azerbaijan Moldova Bosnia and Herzegovina Poland Bulgaria Romania Croatia Serbia Czech Republic Slovenia Estonia Slovak Republic Georgia Tajikistan Hungary Turkey Kazakhstan Ukraine Kyrgyz Republic Uzbekistan Latvia East Asia Cambodia Philippines (14) Fiji Solomon Islands Indonesia Taiwan Lao PDR Timor Leste Mongolia Tonga Palau Vanuatu Papua New Guinea Vietnam LAC Bolivia Guyana (4) Dominican Republic Honduras MNA (2) Algeria Morocco South Bangladesh Pakistan Asia India Sri Lanka (5) Nepal Africa Angola Mali (28) Benin Mauritania Botswana Mauritius Burkina Faso Mozambique Burundi Namibia Congo Niger Congo (Democratic) Nigeria Ethiopia Senegal Gambia Sierra Leone Ghana South Africa Guinea Tanzania Kenya Uganda Madagascar Zambia Malawi Zimbabwe 04/12/2007 8Rev-Public Accountability Institutions Monitoring Concept Note(final).doc