The World Bank - A catalyst for change?
Improving accountability is key to making services work for poor people. But the World Bank's proposal for reform raises questions about what their own role should be
One of the features – and one of the causes – of poverty is a lack of access to basic public services such as health, education and sanitation, and in consequence, poor health and illiteracy, which undercuts the capacity of poor people to profit from using their most abundant resource – their labour.
This year the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR 2004) addresses the challenges of making essential public services reach the poor. The problem of restricted access to public services, or of appalling quality and even abusive treatment if these services are available, are enormously complex, involving issues such as funding constraints in poor countries, inappropriate or wrongly targeting services, and sheer corruption.
Power relations in service delivery
This is not just a matter of the diversion of resources intended for the poor to the pockets of the rich, but includes various forms of ‘everyday’ corruption in service delivery – where doctors fail to show up to work and oblige patients to attend their private practices, where nurses bootleg drugs, and where teachers take bribes for leaking exam questions to students.
Unlike wealthier groups who may ‘exit’ from public services by purchasing private alternatives, poor people have little option but to endure mistreatment or neglect. Their reliance on favours from local elite patrons, their relatively scant resources for collective action, mean that they are not in a strong position to protest or to try to improve accountability in service delivery. In recognising this, the WDR 2004 addresses the power relations that govern resource allocations and actual outcomes in the design and delivery of public services. In other words, it addresses the dimension of politics in the making and implementing of public policy on basic services.
The agenda
This year's WDR adds to a movement discernible in some other recent WDRs (notably the WDR of 1997: ‘The State in a Changing World’, and of 2000/2001 ‘Attacking Poverty’) towards an acknowledgement of the responsibility of the state to compensate for market failures and to work for social justice by taking on responsibilities to address the needs of the poor. These reports also show a growing understanding of the impact of power differences, political competition, and institutional failure on policy outcomes. There is an agenda behind this.
This year’s UN Human Development Report reviewed the challenges of meeting the Millennium Development Goals and concluded that a significant increase in aid resources would be needed for the poorest countries to come close to achieving them – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In pointing to the impact of power relations on spending patterns and their outcomes, the World Bank is standing by a conviction that ‘throwing money’ at a problem will not make it go away. Almost as important as levels of funding is how the money is spent, and whether ordinary citizens can find out where they money went. In other words, accountability relationships, and the systems for translating citizen preferences into policy instructions, performance measures, and monitoring systems, are key to making services reach the poor.
Understanding institutional failure
The WDR 2004 develops a framework for understanding the political economy of institutional failure, of anti-poor bias, in public services. In particular, it develops a fine-tuned understanding of how accountability relationships are affected by uneven power relationships and elite interference in the relationships between public service clients and providers, citizens and policy-makers, and policy-makers and providers.
Difficulties in adequately supervising and monitoring service providers enable them to abuse the considerable discretion that they have when responding to clients’ needs. The politicisation of public sector jobs – where people without the right qualifications can bribe their way into positions they do not deserve, with responsibilities they cannot or will not fulfill – means that it is hard for policy-makers to hold service providers to account. Infrequent elections and a lack of other means of communicating with public authorities limit the extent to which citizens can make politicians and policy-makers answer for these problems. There are other accountability institutions that could curb the excesses of service providers, but these – like the judiciary or the audit office – may be unable to do so because of elite capture.
It is impressive, and virtually unprecedented, to see the World Bank candidly detailing abuses of power, and explaining why there are few incentives for politicians in poor countries to invest in pro-poor services, or exploring the mystery of why the poor, so often in a majority, fail to use their electoral strength to vote for reform.
Contentious territory
This WDR offers a range of ideas for improving public services that gives a significant place to measures that empower clients vis a vis providers and policy-makers. This brings the World Bank into contentious territory, as citizen-policy-maker interactions are deeply influenced by the nature of the political regime and the conduct of political competition, and these are areas that the Bank has refrained from pronouncing upon in its dealings with authoritarian and corrupt governments.
Even efforts to augment the ‘voice’ of poor people and enhance citizen engagement with accountability functions – such as auditing local government expenditures, or monitoring the performance of teachers or nurses and publishing the results in the papers – are controversial and can trigger defensiveness and a backlash by public sector actors.
The WDR does not address the question of who should implement its proposals for accountability reforms. Poor country governments have no incentive to empower social actors to more effectively expose the failings of officials. International aid donors have to be wary of interfering with local power relations – such actions have unpredictable and often unintended effects.
Any agenda that places the onus on the poor to make claims to rights to better services has to recognise that it is asking those with the most to lose from disrupting existing systems to take the greatest risks. The agenda for accountability reforms proposed in the WDR raises two key questions for the Bank and other international aid institutions about their role in catalysing what are essentially political changes: questions about whether they can, practically, prompt such changes, and questions about whether they, as external actors, should.
The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of IDS as a whole.
- Anne Marie Goetz, IDS Fellow
One of the features – and one of the causes – of poverty is a lack of access to basic public services such as health, education and sanitation, and in consequence, poor health and illiteracy, which undercuts the capacity of poor people to profit from using their most abundant resource – their labour.
This year the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR 2004) addresses the challenges of making essential public services reach the poor. The problem of restricted access to public services, or of appalling quality and even abusive treatment if these services are available, are enormously complex, involving issues such as funding constraints in poor countries, inappropriate or wrongly targeting services, and sheer corruption.
Power relations in service delivery
This is not just a matter of the diversion of resources intended for the poor to the pockets of the rich, but includes various forms of ‘everyday’ corruption in service delivery – where doctors fail to show up to work and oblige patients to attend their private practices, where nurses bootleg drugs, and where teachers take bribes for leaking exam questions to students.
Unlike wealthier groups who may ‘exit’ from public services by purchasing private alternatives, poor people have little option but to endure mistreatment or neglect. Their reliance on favours from local elite patrons, their relatively scant resources for collective action, mean that they are not in a strong position to protest or to try to improve accountability in service delivery. In recognising this, the WDR 2004 addresses the power relations that govern resource allocations and actual outcomes in the design and delivery of public services. In other words, it addresses the dimension of politics in the making and implementing of public policy on basic services.
The agenda
This year's WDR adds to a movement discernible in some other recent WDRs (notably the WDR of 1997: ‘The State in a Changing World’, and of 2000/2001 ‘Attacking Poverty’) towards an acknowledgement of the responsibility of the state to compensate for market failures and to work for social justice by taking on responsibilities to address the needs of the poor. These reports also show a growing understanding of the impact of power differences, political competition, and institutional failure on policy outcomes. There is an agenda behind this.
This year’s UN Human Development Report reviewed the challenges of meeting the Millennium Development Goals and concluded that a significant increase in aid resources would be needed for the poorest countries to come close to achieving them – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In pointing to the impact of power relations on spending patterns and their outcomes, the World Bank is standing by a conviction that ‘throwing money’ at a problem will not make it go away. Almost as important as levels of funding is how the money is spent, and whether ordinary citizens can find out where they money went. In other words, accountability relationships, and the systems for translating citizen preferences into policy instructions, performance measures, and monitoring systems, are key to making services reach the poor.
Understanding institutional failure
The WDR 2004 develops a framework for understanding the political economy of institutional failure, of anti-poor bias, in public services. In particular, it develops a fine-tuned understanding of how accountability relationships are affected by uneven power relationships and elite interference in the relationships between public service clients and providers, citizens and policy-makers, and policy-makers and providers.
Difficulties in adequately supervising and monitoring service providers enable them to abuse the considerable discretion that they have when responding to clients’ needs. The politicisation of public sector jobs – where people without the right qualifications can bribe their way into positions they do not deserve, with responsibilities they cannot or will not fulfill – means that it is hard for policy-makers to hold service providers to account. Infrequent elections and a lack of other means of communicating with public authorities limit the extent to which citizens can make politicians and policy-makers answer for these problems. There are other accountability institutions that could curb the excesses of service providers, but these – like the judiciary or the audit office – may be unable to do so because of elite capture.
It is impressive, and virtually unprecedented, to see the World Bank candidly detailing abuses of power, and explaining why there are few incentives for politicians in poor countries to invest in pro-poor services, or exploring the mystery of why the poor, so often in a majority, fail to use their electoral strength to vote for reform.
Contentious territory
This WDR offers a range of ideas for improving public services that gives a significant place to measures that empower clients vis a vis providers and policy-makers. This brings the World Bank into contentious territory, as citizen-policy-maker interactions are deeply influenced by the nature of the political regime and the conduct of political competition, and these are areas that the Bank has refrained from pronouncing upon in its dealings with authoritarian and corrupt governments.
Even efforts to augment the ‘voice’ of poor people and enhance citizen engagement with accountability functions – such as auditing local government expenditures, or monitoring the performance of teachers or nurses and publishing the results in the papers – are controversial and can trigger defensiveness and a backlash by public sector actors.
The WDR does not address the question of who should implement its proposals for accountability reforms. Poor country governments have no incentive to empower social actors to more effectively expose the failings of officials. International aid donors have to be wary of interfering with local power relations – such actions have unpredictable and often unintended effects.
Any agenda that places the onus on the poor to make claims to rights to better services has to recognise that it is asking those with the most to lose from disrupting existing systems to take the greatest risks. The agenda for accountability reforms proposed in the WDR raises two key questions for the Bank and other international aid institutions about their role in catalysing what are essentially political changes: questions about whether they can, practically, prompt such changes, and questions about whether they, as external actors, should.
The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of IDS as a whole.
- Anne Marie Goetz, IDS Fellow
publicado por MP às 12:43
