Poverty reduction in South Asia is a precondition for sustaining any form of reforms in governance. The new public management reforms which started in South Asia from Sri Lanka taking the initiative in 1977–78 have been a decisive break from the previously practised State driven protectionist system. Investment in the region has been rising and even per capita income has shown some increase, yet the state has not been able to lead these reforms appropriately and efficiently. Thus poverty has not been reduced, ordinary people continue to languish under government programmes and the socially excluded remain outside the mainstream decision making bodies. Governance in South Asia faces the single most important challenge of poverty reduction which continues to blunt and disfigure capacity, self esteem and service delivery system to the poor. This book attempts to bring out microlevel studies from many regions in South Asia to address issues of entrepreneurship, knowledge and professionalism. As an initiator of the idea on developing a critique to the straightjacketed ‘best practice’ research, this book questions the standard practice in evaluating administrative reforms as not being the true base for knowledge. Administrators need to balance capacity and control in every implementation programme. Confining to the knowledge of ‘best practices’ may conceal enormous amount of information from the ‘less than best’ practices which may be necessary to sustain good initiatives of public managers. This book highlights areas of active networking, partnerships and collaborations amongst state and non-state bodies, NGOs and specialist Science and Technical Organizations. The true nature of governance is explained and demonstrated through the processes which otherwise pass off undetected in macro-understanding of governance.

A notable group of social scientists explore the political economy of good governance and how it relates to performance management, the influence of political parties, education and health issues in developing countries, the economic performance of transition economies, and the effects of climate on poverty.

Pt. 1. Employment generation and participatory -- pt. 2. Local economic development -- pt. 3. Agriculture and rural development for poverty reduction -- pt. 4. Localization of millennium development goals and monitoring -- pt. 5. Social safety nets and microfinance -- pt. 6. Community mobilization and advocacy for the millennium development goals.

In many low and middle income countries, dismal failures in the quality of public service delivery such as absenteeism among teachers and doctors and leakages of public funds have driven the agenda for better governance and accountability. This has raised interest in the idea that citizens can contribute to improved quality of service delivery by holding policy-makers and providers of services accountable. This proposition is particularly resonant when it comes to the human development sectors – health, education and social protection – which involve close interactions between providers and citizens/users of services. Governments, NGOs, and donors alike have been experimenting with various “social accountability” tools that aim to inform citizens and communities about their rights, the standards of service delivery they should expect, and actual performance; and facilitate access to formal redress mechanisms to address service failures. The report reviews how citizens – individually and collectively – can influence service delivery through access to information and opportunities to use it to hold providers – both frontline service providers and program managers – accountable. It focuses on social accountability measures that support the use of information to increase transparency and service delivery and grievance redress mechanisms to help citizens use information to improve accountability. The report takes stock of what is known from international evidence and from within projects supported by the World Bank to identify knowledge gaps, key questions and areas for further work. It synthesizes experience to date; identifies what resources are needed to support more effective use of social accountability tools and approaches; and formulates considerations for their use in human development. The report concludes that the relationships between citizens, policy-makers, program managers, and service providers are complicated, not always direct or easily altered through a single intervention, such as an information campaign or scorecard exercise. The evidence base on social accountability mechanisms in the HD sectors is under development. There is a small but growing set of evaluations which test the impact of information interventions on service delivery and HD outcomes. There is ample space for future experiments to test how to make social accountability work at the country level.

Sri Lanka is well known f ...

The World Bank has recently defined two strategic goals: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Shared prosperity is measured as income growth among the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution in the population. The two goals should be achieved in a way that is sustainable from economic, social, and environmental perspectives. Shared Prosperity: Paving the Way in Europe and Central Asia focuses on the second goal and proposes a framework that integrates both macroeconomic and microeconomic elements. The macro variables, particularly changes in relative prices, affect income growth differentially along the income distribution; at the same time, the microeconomic distribution of assets at the bottom of the distribution determines the capacity of the bottom 40 to take advantage of the macroeconomic environment and contribute to overall growth. Growth and the incidence of growth are thus understood as jointly determined processes. Besides this integration, the main input of the framework is the finding that the trade-off between growth and equity may be an issue only in the short run. Over the long run, redistribution policies that increase the productive capacity of the bottom 40 percent enhance the overall growth potential of the economy. This report considers shared prosperity in Europe and Central Asia and concludes that the performance in sharing prosperity during the period 2000–10 was good, on average, but heterogeneous across countries and that sustainability is unclear. It also describes examples of the application of the framework to selected countries in the region. Finally, the report provides a tool to structure the policy discussion around the goal of shared prosperity and explains that specific policy links associated with the goal can be established only after a thorough analysis of the country-specific context.