The Multilevel-Governance and Decentralization for Delivery Program (MDDP)

Objective

The role that decentralization plays in public sector management around the world is evolving. Whereas decentralization has traditionally been pursued in countries as a governance reform to increase political competition and to bring the public sector closer to the people, multilevel governance reforms to strengthen subnational governance and intergovernmental relations are increasingly understood as critical to promote inclusive service delivery and ensuring the efficient use of public finances.

By their very nature, the processes and systems of decentralization, multilevel governance and intergovernmental relations are complex and multi-faceted. Ensuring the effective functioning of the public sector across different levels of government to achieve equitable national policy objectives at the grassroots and local level, requires action to strengthen political, administrative, sectoral, and fiscal aspects of public sector management at the same time. As economic development, infrastructure and services are often delivered by subnational institutions, multilevel governance is critical for sector delivery in education, water, social protection, transport and urban development.

The Multilevel Governance and Decentralization for Delivery Program (MDDP) aims to advance and curate global knowledge and strengthen World Bank support to client governments working at the intersection of decentralization, multilevel governance, and sector delivery.     

• The Governance GP will continue developing Global Knowledge. The WB contributed to this interdisciplinary field with several knowledge products such as (i) Primers on Decentralization, Multilevel Governance, and Intergovernmental Relations; (ii) Fiscal Decentralization, Local Public Sector Finance, and Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers; (iii) Conditional Grants in Principle, in Practice and in Operations and (iv) Subnational Human Resource Management. It also developed several lessons learned notes on engagements with multi-level governance and decentralization.
• The MDDP will support World Bank lending and analytical operations. This will be achieved by fostering partnerships with stakeholders and by improving access to data and knowledge.

Improving Global Knowledge

Previous work done by the World Bank on decentralization and multilevel governance forms a sound basis from which to explore novel areas of research and contribute to the global understanding of decentralization and multilevel governance. The Program will continue to produce knowledge through EFI publications (Insights, Notes, and Results) as well as policy guidance notes, case studies, and blogs. The knowledge products will cover cross-cutting themes such as: the role of subnational governments in implementing climate policies; deployment of GovTech tools to improve service delivery; the effectiveness of decentralization in mitigating conflicts.

Global Access to Multivel Governance Data

Providing governments, development partners, and the public with the right tools to analyze multilevel governance structures helps to increase transparency and strengthens our understanding of how the public administration of a country operates at different levels, both de facto and de jure. It can also help inform fiscal and administrative policy decision-making, which leads to improved public service delivery and a more productive public sector overall. Finally, if the public administration moves closer to the citizen through decentralization it can help strengthen the social contract – particularly in countries where governments have struggled to provide public services. The MDDP serves as a hub for information exchange across these different sectors.

The MDDP can help expand available data and knowledge on three levels:

• Comparative Global Data: Comparative data and institutional and fiscal maps that will allow cross-country comparison by collecting institutional and fiscal data using a bottom-up approach and cross-referencing it with extant top-down data. The maps are currently being piloted in test countries.
• Reform Examples and Successes: A database of reform examples and case studies of successful reforms in multilevel governments, decentralization, and delivery.
• Examples of World Bank and other Engagements:  A database of examples of analytical and operational work carried out by World Bank teams and other development partners.

Country Engagements and Operational Work at the Subnational Level

MDDP will support a wide number of World Bank lending and analytical projects in all regions.

Analytical work can supplement the comparative global data collection, to help identify service delivery bottlenecks, weaknesses in fiscal transfer systems, implementation of administrative reforms at different government levels. Data for these diagnostics may be collected through surveys, fiscal data, interviews, or even more novel technologies such as satellite data i.e. (SUPERMUN i.e.).

A lot of multilevel governance operations are being implemented by other practices and MDDP will use these established links to further help:

• Improve fiscal transfer mechanisms across different government levels
• Improve the effectiveness of intergovernmental or vertical service delivery systems
• Better align administrative decentralization/deconcentration with fiscal decentralization
• Strengthen local revenue administration and subnational debt and capital management
• Strengthen horizontal collaboration across different government tiers for greater governance effectiveness

The program can also help play a key role in promoting new global operational approaches such as the recently launched GovEnable approach. GovEnable focuses among others on identifying binding constraints and bottlenecks in multilevel governance systems and directly contributes to solving some of the challenges at the subnational level.

A Global Network & Partnership

Leveraging the World Bank’s convening power, the MDDP will mobilize Stakeholders operating in the multilevel governance, local service delivery and decentralization space. Stakeholders may include select country governments, development partners, private sector representatives, academia, and civil society. The network may help draw attention to the importance of this work and illustrate its beneficial impact across the world.

Partners will contribute to strengthen the evidence-base and knowledge on decentralization and multilevel governance reform, by co-hosting and helping to organize Forums, sharing knowledge and experience by organizing learning events and contributing to publications. The network may help to leverage scarce resources by combining efforts to support the development of global public goods and/or country-level diagnostics.