Government Reform: Inspirations from Developing Countries (Part 5)

Several developing countries are making seemingly breathtaking progress in developing performance management frameworks from scratch. What can we learn from them? Today’s focus is on the commonalities in the performance management approaches used across four developing countries.

The World Bank seminars this past Spring continue to have me mulling about the progress of the performance movement internationally, and how surprised I was that several countries seem to be putting foundations for performance in place at two or three times the speed of more developed countries. Four countries struck me as making notable progress, which are summarized in earlier blog posts: Colombia, South Africa, Kenya, and Malaysia:

World Bank analyst Gisu Mohadjer offers some useful observations when making her summary assessment across the case studies of the four countries:

• The creation of overarching frameworks for outcomes (Vision 2015 in South Africa, Vision 2020 in Malaysia, etc)
• The importance of having a government mandate to proceed.
• Having the institutional pre-requisites such as: performance measurement skills, analytic capacity, and data availability. But also important are the use and documentation of routines, and a commitment to use the data-driven findings of analyses.
• Having quick gains and a selective focus, as well as a longer-term focus on building institutional capacity (e.g., like the U.S. Defense Department did when creating its Planning Programming Budgeting and Execution System)
• The importance of customer feedback and citizen engagement in the development of policy embedded in the performance process.

Other Blogs in Series on Government Reform:

Part 1: An International Snapshot of Progress on Performance Management

Part 2: The New Zealand Example

Part 3: Colombia and South Africa

Part 4: Kenya and Malaysia

Part 5: Inspirations from Developing Countries

Part 6: Insights for the Future of the Movement