This brief explains why and how technical characteristics of particular sectors influence the incentives for politicians, service providers and service users, and the relationships between these groups. While sector experts often intuitively understand specific blockages in their sector, the approach presented here structures this understanding in a way that allows for comparisons across sectors, highlighting important differences and similarities between them. The aim is to help practitioners understand why different sectors might attract different forms of politics even in the same macro political environment, and to provide a stronger foundation for coordination between governance and sector specialists seeking to understand why certain blockages persist and how to address them.
It finds that the following characteristics need to be considered:
- The availability of rents in the sector(s): The availability of rents can be shaped by the broader national political economy environment, but may also be mediated by sector technical characteristics. Improved understanding of the types of rents available, their distribution and the mechanisms in place for their management can add significantly to any understanding of the way a sector operates.
- The dominant organisational arrangements: The organisational arrangements – sometimes called ‘modes of provision’ – within a sector will also have political implications. Organisational arrangements refer to ‘who does what’ in relation to delivering a particular service. They often vary in different countries, for example between highly centralised provision by the state to decentralised provision, where the state plays only a regulatory role. The nature of these organisational arrangements is important because it can reveal something about the state’s incentives for provision and the political salience of the sector, as well as shaping the relative influence of different stakeholders.
- Understanding relationships: The cases reinforced the need to revisit our initial framing of the politics of service delivery, which emphasised the various accountability relationships involved in service provision, to one that draws on a wider range of relationships, including those within ‘user’, ‘provider’ and ‘government’ groups.
Better understanding of how political and governance dynamics play out in relation to service delivery, from particular types of activities to sector-specific technical features to the broader governance environment, has at least three key implications for policy and programming:
- First, identifying how the nature of the sector interacts with the wider governance environment allows us to better identify the entry points for reform. Some issues may be resolved by reforms or support aimed at the particular activity, or sector; others may require broader, more systemic changes, and new partnerships or forms of engagement that go beyond the sector in question. In either case, programming will benefit from a common language and set of concepts to help bridge the gap between those working on issues of governance and sector specialists.
- Second, sector characteristics open up opportunities for more cross-sector dialogue and lesson learning. For instance, they can highlight recurring problems of bias towards visibility (often leading to a prioritisation of construction over quality) across sectors, or shared challenges of information asymmetry undermining user accountability and barriers to collective action.
- Third, this approach allows us to better tailor policy responses to the enabling (or constraining) environment. For example, the provision of information to service users may be less effective where user demand is low (e.g. in the case of merit goods) or where information asymmetries are unlikely to be overcome (e.g. where specialist technical knowledge is required). In such cases, alternative approaches, such as the strengthening of monitoring by professional associations, may be more effective. Building the evidence base further, to identify where characteristics that hinder effective accountability relationships have been successfully addressed, will be a key priority of our future work agenda in 2013.
