Practice Area: Governance

Practice Area: Governance

Why some people enjoy the fruits of good governance and others suffer from poor services, corruption and predatory public entities is a topic all too-real for millions. The Urban Institute conducts research and works with counterparts to understand how governance affects development outcomes and to implement reforms and practices that deliver better services to citizens.

This involves working with both citizens and government to develop improvements in the transparency of public decision-making and operations, and to improve accountability mechanisms that give both voice and authority to the consumers of public sector activity. Often this involves us working with local governments, but also with national level ministries and citizen groups and associations of many sorts. There are currently three main areas of UI attention in the governance area: Civic Engagement, Anti-Corruption, and Decentralization.

1. Civic Engagement: Citizens worldwide suffer the consequences of ineffective governance, from poor management of resources and services, to corruption that siphons off resources and demoralizes the civic culture. Building that civic culture, replete with effective government institutions and a highly engaged citizenry, is a challenge UI has successfully met in a large variety of socio-political contexts. In fact, UI’s work demonstrates a strong correlation between good governance—and the empowered citizens and government officials this implies—and measurable improvements in a community’s overall quality of life.
   
   For decades, UI has worked to bridge the gap between citizens and government, creating a rich platform for participation, mutual trust and accountability that has greatly improved the lives of ordinary citizens. At UI, we strive for practical and sustainable solutions that reflect the needs of multiple stakeholders. While we carefully evaluate each new project with great care and offer no fix-all solutions, we have a variety of tried and true approaches to leverage the social and economic capital of citizens and government to bring about progress toward shared goals.
2. Anti-Corruption: There are many explanations for the persistence of corruption—but most include agreement that corruption has beneficiaries able to defend the status quo, while those harmed, often only indirectly, have little specific knowledge and few tools for asserting their interests.
   
   Improving the Accountability of Officials
   • Decentralizing responsibility for public expenditure
   • Performance Based Budgeting
   • Financial accountability systems

   Increasing Transparency of Government Action

   • Pre-budget consultations
   • Service Improvement Action Plans
   • Government Asset Inventories, Auctions

   Citizen Access to Government Performance Results

   • Civil Society Budget Engagement, Capacity
   • Service Improvement and Citizen Monitoring
   • Training of  Journalists

   Measuring Corruption and Service Delivery

   • Performance management data methodologies
   • Budget implementation oversight
   • Citizen surveys
3. Decentralization: As more and more countries around the world begin to decentralize, it becomes apparent that building capacity in local governments is essential to the effectiveness of decentralization to live up to its promise of improving municipal services and responsiveness to citizen needs.  Decentralization results in new roles and responsibilities for sub-national levels of government, but also for national governments as they shift from day-to-day control to a more regulatory role. Our approach to successful decentralization requires well-thought out policy, capacity building and training at all levels, and an ongoing dialogue between the central and sub-national governments on implementation.