Impact assessments: How can we close the implementation gap in the public sector?

An important part of the knowledge necessary to manage public services is generated precisely within the organizations that offer such services. This is where decisions are made every day regarding the use of resources. This flow of experiences contains basic information to generate knowledge about management, which can lead to better public services.

However, understanding the problems of the population and the policy alternatives to address them does not always lead to effective action, because the incentive structure and the institutional constraints faced by civil servants pose barriers to leveraging available knowledge.

In order to implement assessments, policy makers use (scarce) resources in public administration to evaluate programs, rather than expanding the number of beneficiaries of such programs, and even taking the risk of being exposed as a poor public administrator and compromising their chances of re-election. In addition, the timeframe of policy makers may differ from that of the assessment, because the latter can take from several months to several years, which is inconsistent with the short-term vision of electoral cycles.

So, how can we close the implementation gap of impact assessments? This issue will be discussed by Daniel Ortega, Director of Impact Assessment and Policy Learning at CAF—development bank of Latin America—in a free-access Hangout.

Date: Friday, December 14, 2018

Time: 3:30 p.m. (UTC -4:00, Caracas)