“A Review of the Evidence on Open Budgeting” is a recent report by the World Bank Institute’sCapacity Development and Results team. It explores key questions and existing evidence around the impact of open budgeting. Despite the growing body of literature, there remains limited substantiation for whether and how open budgeting contributes to reductions in poverty and improvements in the lives of the poor. This report pieces together the results chain presenting evidence for and against from the literature. It explores links between open budgeting and indicators of impact such as human development and public service delivery. The findings highlight the importance of measuring budget transparency, accountability, and participation. The findings show that the impact of institutional changes differ under varying conditions in specific contexts. The conclusions of the report point to the need for further investigation into impact and establishing effective measurement practices for monitoring related institutional change under varying conditions and different contexts.”
Does democracy promote development? Despite a large number of empirical studies of this question, the evidence remains inconclusive since it is difficult to establish causality running from democracy to development: democracy is likely to be endogenous to socio-economic factors that also affect development (Lipset 1959). As democracy at the national level is clearly not randomly assigned across countries, the empirical challenge is to disentangle the effect of democracy from other confounding factors to the largest possible extent. This paper revisits this question in the context of human development in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, I investigate whether the democratization sweeping the region in the 1990s has reduced infant mortality.
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My findings are as follows. After democratization in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, infant mortality drops by 1.2 percentage points (12% of the sample mean). This result is robust to controlling for country-specific linear trends in the birth year of babies, country-specific birth-order dummies, country-specific quadratic trends in the mother’s age at birth, and country-level covariates such as per capita GDP, the incidence of wars, and the amount of foreign aid. Except for a couple of outlying cases, there is no such reduction in infant mortality in countries where the dictator holds multiparty elections and stays in power by winning them or where leadership change takes place in a nondemocratic way.
If you are working in the fields of development or governance it’s highly likely that you’ve come across the term “theory of change” (ToC). At a conference a couple of weeks ago, while answering some questions, I mentioned that I preferred not to use the term. The comment didn’t go unnoticed by some witty observers on Twitter, and I was surprised by the number of people who came to me afterwards asking why I do not “like” theory of change.
I can see why some people are attracted to the term. First, “change” is a powerful word: it even helps win elections. And when it comes to governance issues, the need for change is almost a consensus. Second, the user of the word “theory” gives scientific verve to the conversation. However, the problem is precisely the appropriateness of its use if one thinks of the word in scientific terms. It seems that people are saying “theory” when they actually mean (at best) “hypothesis”.
We don’t have to go very far to find out what scientific theory actually is. Keeping to information that is just a click away, let’s take one of the definitions reproduced in Wikipedia’s entry for “theory”:
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not “guesses” but reliable accounts of the real world.
A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
And here’s a rap video on the difference between theory and hypothesis:
Granted, the word “theory” is often used as a synonym of “hypothesis”, and even dictionaries do so. But the problem of this in the context of current usages of “theory of change” is that it masks the difference between what we know and do not know about something, often conveying a false sense of scientific rigor. And, particularly when it comes to issues such as development and governance, it is extremely important to have a clear distinction between well-substantiated explanations and every other color of hypotheses, assumptions, and guesses. In fact, in any field, it is a minimal requirement for the production of knowledge.
So here’s an interesting exercise. Search on the web for the use of “theory of change” combined with terms like “accountability” and “open government.” Find, for yourself, which ones are really “theories of change” or, rather, merely “hunches of change.”
Most likely, people will keep using theory of change indiscriminately until the next flavor of the moment comes up. In the meantime, beware.
A report by Brian Wampler for the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT):
Citizen participation in budgetary and other fiscal processes has been expanding at international, national, and local levels over the past 15 years. The direct participation of citizens, it is hoped, will improve governance, limit misuse of public funds, and produce more informed, engaged citizens. At the national level, reformist governments now encourage the direct engagement of citizens during multiple moments of the policy cycle—from initial policy formulation to the oversight of policy implementation. Reformist governments hope to take advantage of increased citizen participation to increase their legitimacy, thus allowing them to change spending and policy priorities, increase state effectiveness by make public bureaucrats more responsive to citizens and elected officials, and, finally, ensure that the quality of public services improves. During the 1980s and 1990s, many subnational governments took advantage of policy decentralization to experiment with new institutional types. Direct citizen participation has been most robust at subnational levels due to the decreased costs and the greater direct impact of citizens on policymaking.
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The main purpose of this report is to examine how three countries, South Korea, Brazil, and the Philippines, have made extensive efforts to create new institutions and policies that encourage the participation of citizens and CSOs in complex policy processes. South Korea developed an institutional arrangement based on policy experts, CSOs, and the Korean Development Institute. Brazil uses a model that relies extensively on the participation of citizens at multiple tiers of government. Finally, the Philippines use a mixed model that incorporates citizens and CSOs at national and subnational levels
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Political reformers seeking to incorporate greater numbers of people into policymaking venues face a series of challenges. These include: (1) asymmetrical access to information as well as differing skills base to interpret information; (2) the difficultly of decision-making when groups grow in size; (3) a reduction in the importance of any single participant due to the greater number of participants; (4) political contestation over who has the right to participate; (5) who are the legitimate representatives of different groups; and (6) higher organizational costs (time, money, personnel). This report maps out how new participatory institutions and programs that are designed to help governments and their civil society allies draw citizens directly into decision-making processes.To explain the variation in the type of participatory experiences now used by different countries,we identify four factors that most strongly affect the types of participation-oriented reforms as well as the results. These four factors include: (a) presidential-level support for reform, (b) the configuration of civil society, (c) state capacity and (d) the geo-political direction of reform (topdown/center –periphery vs. bottom-up/periphery/center. It is the combination of these four factors that most strongly explains the type of institutions adopted in each of these countries.
DemocracySpot 