The OECD is supporting the Palestinian Authority (PA) to enhance governance and the rule of law. The project, funded by the European Commission, aims to contribute to achieving a more effective, transparent and participatory policy- and law-making process set in a clear normative framework, and thus enhance the Palestinian people’s and businesses’ trust in their public institutions’ action. The project includes a review with tailored recommendations that identify opportunities and key areas for improvement on policy- and law-making in the PA.
The policy- and law-making process takes place in a difficult political setting for the PA. Following the 2006 election and the political division between Fatah and Hamas, the activities of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) – the PA’s Legislature – were suspended, before the PLC was officially dissolved in 2018. In the absence of a legislature, the President issues decrees. Moreover, humanitarian urgencies as well as an unstable budget situation both on the income and expenditure side represent significant obstacles to legislative planning.
Problem identification and policy formulation are critical processes for achieving responsive and efficient governance and service delivery. Both steps are crucial for sound policy-making. Effective policy development, as highlighted in the OECD Policy Framework on Sound Public Governance (OECD, 2020[1]) is critical to ensuring that governments can translate long, medium and short-term policy goals into concrete courses of action. It also provides an opportunity for governments to collaborate with a broad array of stakeholders and as such is core to the democratic process. It ensures the public governance values - for instance of integrity, openness and transparency, inclusiveness and accountability to name but a few - are adopted widely across government, mainstreamed and integrated not only in the design, but also in the policy implementation process. Translating high-level priorities and the government vision into achievable policies constitutes one of the greatest challenges in policy-making.
Based on the OECD Policy Framework on Sound Public Governance (OECD, 2020[1]) and the SIGMA Principles of Public Administration (OECD/SIGMA, 2017[2]), Part I focuses on the early stages of policy-making with a focus on legislative aspects. It provides concrete and actionable recommendations to the Palestinian Authority to strengthen the problem identification and policy formulation processes of policy- and legislative-making. First, Part I assesses the Palestinian Authority’s institutional co-ordination for policy formulation, before it proceeds with analysing different elements of the problem identification and assessment as well as the policy formulation process.
As part of the complementary Public Administration Reform project with the Palestinian Authority, the OECD will develop a complementary review to look at other stages of the policy-making process, including policy delivery, monitoring, and evaluation. This forthcoming review will also assess the role of policy planning units. Part I, therefore, only focuses on the early stages of the policy cycle, namely problem identification and assessment as well as policy formulation.
