Governance and Policy Coordination

Establishing “what works under what conditions” is becoming a mantra in the development context, both in academia and among international development organizations. This, however, is not an issue of the technical modalities of service provision alone. Just as important is their contextual framing, including analyzing real time governance factors. It is necessary to understand and address bottlenecks that impede the success of an intervention, or that make an intervention that works well in one context unrealistic or inappropriate in another. This means having an analysis of institutions and the power relations within and between them, as well as the incentives motivating both elites and the behaviour of service users (or non-users, as the case may be). Coordination is a critical governance issue. UNICEF’s Monitoring Results for Equity approach identifies coordination as a determinant of results for children, alongside other governance issues such as budgeting, management and legislation. This is why the Office of Research has partnered with Guy Peters, Professor of American Governance at the University of Pittsburgh, to carry out two case studies on bottlenecks in coordination, of which this study in Ghana is the first.