Building institutional capacity for policy analysis: an alternative approach to sustainability: SUMMARY

The project approach to development assistance has been criticized for failing to build lasting capacity. The problem lies not in the project approach itself, but in a failure to understand the constraints to capacity development and a consequent misdirection of effort. Policy analysis capacity is d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Public administration and development 1984-01, Vol.4 (1), p.1
Main Author: Bremer, Jennifer Ann
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural policy
Agriculture
Bureaucracy
Developing countries
Employment
LDCs
Politics
Public sector
Skills
Wages & salaries
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Summary:The project approach to development assistance has been criticized for failing to build lasting capacity. The problem lies not in the project approach itself, but in a failure to understand the constraints to capacity development and a consequent misdirection of effort. Policy analysis capacity is developed as an example. Policy analysis requires skills and abilities that public sector institutions in developing countries cannot sustain, owing to a combination of structural and organizational factors, among which personnel constraints are key. These factors inhibit the effectiveness of the standard approach, which seeks to establish analytic capacity within a specialized government unit ('internal' capacity). An alternative approach is to build 'process' capacity--the ability to get analysis done by other institutions, rather than the ability to do analysis internally. The author concludes that project strategies should be redirected toward a greater emphasis on building process capacity as a useful adjunct to internal capacity.
ISSN:0271-2075
1099-162X