Policy Framework on Sound Public Governance

Introduction: Toward Integrated Sound Public Governance

The Policy Framework on Sound Public Governance (hereafter the Framework) aims to provide governments at all levels with an integrated diagnostic, guidance and benchmarking tool to help:

• Design and implement public governance reforms that can lead to improvements in, and the sustainability of, prosperity for their country and the wellbeing of their citizens;

• Design and implement reforms in any policy area by taking public governance approaches for effective policy-making into account so that reforms can more effectively respond to complex, multidimensional challenges. This takes on added importance as countries move to adapt the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 and implement its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a way that reflects national conditions;

• Design and pursue a public-governance reform agenda that enables governments to move closer to OECD standards and practices in this area.

The primary target audiences of this Framework include centres of government, line ministries, government agencies and other public institutions in the executive branch at all levels of government, especially when they go about designing, implementing and evaluating policy and governance reform agendas. This Framework could also be useful for civil society to assess governments’ participation, decision-making and policy-making arrangements as well as for legislative and judicial branches seeking to modernise their approaches to governance as a means to strengthen capacity to serve citizens and businesses better.

Why a Framework?

More than ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, and as governments strive to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath in a way that optimises and sustains positive outcomes for all citizens, governments are facing increasingly multidimensional policy challenges that require cross-cutting, multifaceted responses in a context of diminishing public resources and low trust levels in government (OECD, 2017_[1]).

While the world faces systemic and interconnected challenges such as climate change and growing inequality; governments remain ill-equipped to deal effectively with these issues (OECD, 2017_[2]). This new scenario has raised multiple challenges for public administrations. Historical governance problems, such as corruption, excessive red tape, inefficient spending and lack of skills, are now exacerbated by bottlenecks that render more difficult or prevent effective co-ordination across different administrative units and policy areas, and the need to identify, attract and retain new sets of skills and capacities in the public sector to address new political and technological developments effectively. Inadequate design, and poor management of institutions and governance instruments and tools lie at the core of governance failures, preventing governments from achieving their goals for their jurisdiction and its citizens (Meuleman, 2018_[3]). For instance, the OECD report on the Governance of Inclusive Growth (2016_[4]) found that governance failures may lead to widespread informality in the labour market, limited access to education and a lack of formal safety nets - all of which drive inequality. Failure often involves substantial financial costs to fix problems with subsequent reforms or mitigate the harm caused. Consequently, governance failure can undermine citizens’ trust in government.

The environmental, social, and economic challenges of our times call for a multidimensional and integrated approach to public policy and service delivery. It is clear that traditional analytical tools and problem-solving methods are no longer enabling the achievement of better results and outcomes that are demanded by and expected from citizens. Innovative approaches to public governance along with more holistic and integrated strategies are required to enable governments to respond effectively to the multidimensional challenges facing society. This need for a holistic commitment to multidimensional and coherent policy design and implementation, and to the governance arrangements that can deliver on this commitment, is reflected in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Governments now strive to bolster capacity to tackle complexity and address systemic challenges while responding to immediate-term priorities generated by political imperatives. At the same time, citizens and civil society are demanding a more equitable, open and inclusive culture of governance, one in which decisions are taken in the public interest rather than under the undue influence of powerful interest groups.

While the Policy Framework is not designed to identify governance failures and the root causes behind them, it highlights different baseline practices that reflect good governance because they illustrate governments that work well, without necessarily being at the frontier of governance. These baseline practices have been, and are being, developed and adopted by OECD Members and Partners in a manner that reflects a values-based approach to governance, where resources are obtained and spent efficiently and in the public interest.

The origins of the Framework

Over more than a decade, notably since the 2008 economic crisis, the OECD, through its Public Governance and Regulatory Policy Committees, has stood witness to, and recorded, the key governance challenges facing national and subnational governments. In so doing, the OECD has accumulated a significant body of evidence from Member and Partner countries and from this evidence has drawn key lessons regarding what works and what does not in terms of the policy responses that have best addressed these governance challenges. In many areas of public governance, the OECD has enshrined principles and good practices emerging from this body of evidence in a number of OECD legal instruments in public governance.1 These instruments embody principles and good practices across key thematic areas of public governance – practices that country-based evidence suggests work best in enabling governments to effectively address the challenges they face in each area (Figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1. OECD legal instruments under the responsibility of the OECD’s Regulatory Policy Committee and Public Governance Committee

Source: OECD Legal Instruments, https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/

The main observations and key lessons learned from over two decades’ worth of effort by governments in designing and implementing public governance reforms include:

• The existence of a significant gap in evidence on how public governance can improve inclusive-growth outcomes;

• Reform leaders struggle with building a business case to engage in comprehensive public governance reform; as it is often seen as a tool to reduce expenditures rather than a means to solve complex policy challenges;

• Top-down approaches devoid of engagement with citizens and civil society usually limit the success of the reform;

• A coherent, integrated, systems-based approach to reform can lead to better results as it allows for the identification of synergies, trade-offs and sequencing considerations.

The genesis of this Framework stems from an initial discussion of these observations during a meeting of the Public Governance Committee (PGC) in 2013. PGC delegates recognised that significant efforts were being made to codify policy recommendations by area (e.g.: regulatory policy and governance, transparency and integrity in lobbying). At the same time, the discussion underscored that what was missing was a narrative that tied it all together coherently in way that could help governments adopt integrated approaches to public governance. Delegates concluded that an integrated narrative could help governments identify trade-offs and sequencing considerations in a governance-reform agenda, thereby enabling governments to prioritise governance-reform initiatives coherently and allocate resources to implement them in a way that sustains impact and optimises positive outcomes.

This Framework builds on these lessons learned and on practices gathered over the past decade through the OECD’s Public Governance Reviews (PGRs) and other country- and sector-specific assessments in public governance. It weaves together a narrative that links together baseline features of sound public governance in the existing OECD legal instruments in public governance while highlighting evidence of emerging good practice in areas of public governance in which no OECD instruments yet exist (for example whole-of-government coordination or evaluating policy performance). The Framework builds on similar exercises developed by the OECD, such as the OECD / EU SIGMA Principles of Public Administration (SIGMA, 2017_[5]), and other international organisations such as the UN Economic and Social Council’s Principles of effective governance for sustainable development (2018_[6]) and the European Commission Quality of Public Administration Toolkit (2017_[71]). Most importantly, the Framework reflects a broad consultation process with international organisations and civil society organisations, with OECD Members, and with the general public.

What is Sound Public Governance for the OECD?

Sound public governance consists of the formal and informal rules, procedures, practices and interactions within the State, and between the State, non-state institutions and citizens, that frame the exercise of public authority and decision-making in the public interest.

Sound public governance constitutes a sine qua non condition for pluralist democracies to give effect to the respect for the rule of law and human rights. Efficient democratic institutions lie at the core of sound public governance.

Sound public governance is therefore the combination of three interconnected elements:

• Values: context-based principles of behaviour that guide public governance across all of its dimensions in a way that advances and upholds the public interest.

• Enablers: an integrated nexus of practices that support the effective definition and implementation of reforms.

• Instruments and tools: a set of public policies and management practices for efficient governance and policy implementation.

Figure 0.2. Elements of Sound Public Governance

Source: Authors' own elaboration

The values, enablers, instruments and tools that underpin sound public governance are to a large extent, mutually interdependent. A sound budgetary policy calls for transparency, participative and integrity measures, as well as for the development of sound monitoring and evaluation tools. Digital government strategies require effective organisational, governance and regulatory frameworks. A whole-of-government regulatory framework necessitates sound co-ordination, stakeholder engagement mechanisms, and management capacity.

How does the Framework work?

While the Framework’s main target audience is the executive branch of government, the content of the Framework can resonate beyond the executive and encourage collaboration across branches and jurisdictions from a whole-of-society perspective.

At the conclusion of each chapter, the Framework poses a small number of questions that readers can use to assess their government’s institutional and decision-making capacity in key public governance areas. The Framework also provides, where possible, reform-implementation guidance based on the toolkits developed to support the implementation of existing Recommendations as well as evidence on trends and practices drawn from the OECD’s broader work with Member and Partner countries.

In practical terms, the Framework is expected to be used:

• As an assessment and benchmarking tool to spotlight specific governance areas for reform and to identify, when pursuing a specific reform, which other governance practices are important to take into consideration (for instance, an open government framework can contribute to the effectiveness of a regulatory policy and vice-versa).

• As a discussion tool to engage with different actors within the State and from civil society in governance assessments and reforms.

• As a guidance tool to pursue reforms, through the provision of resources and links to more specific and detailed information about OECD international standards, toolkits and comparative data on governance areas.

The Framework is intended to complement existing OECD legal instruments in the area of public governance; these instruments will remain the applicable legal standards on public governance at the OECD with their implementation monitored regularly by the relevant committee and reported on to the OECD Council. The Framework will support the implementation of these legal instruments by setting out an integrated vision of public governance that weaves together a coherent and integrated narrative that runs through the OECD’s acquis in this area.

What is the Framework not about?

This Framework is not seeking to impose a univocal vision of, or single recipe for, public governance; nor does it seek to gloss over the many context-based factors affecting the capacity of governments to integrate these practices into public management (e.g. size of country and government; homogeneity of the civil service; level of government; etc.). Additionally, while it intends to provide a holistic approach to public governance, it is not exhaustive. As it primarily presents OECD work in the area, it does not include important elements on which the OECD has gathered limited evidence, for instance on the internal organisation of specific ministries or administrative units, the governance of addressing major public security challenges or managing the emergence of societies from conflict, which are particularly context-based. That said the Framework’s key values, enablers, instruments and tools can potentially be adapted to assist governments in addressing these challenges as well.

The future of the Framework

The Framework as a tool is designed to be evergreen and easily updatable as practices evolve, new evidence is collected, and current OECD legal instruments are revised or new ones adopted. Forthcoming editions therefore aim to present new examples of good governance that illustrate the frontier of practice reflecting sound public governance. Indeed, future editions of the Framework may include time-bound performance indicators to assess the maturity of governance systems. The objective of embedding possible “maturity models” related to governance practice, notably linked to the assessment questions presented at the end of the chapter sections, would be to provide practical, indicator-based tools for governments to monitor and evaluate their progress in moving closer to the frontier of OECD standards in the areas of public governance highlighted in the Framework. The OECD hopes that these future editions will continue to be useful to Member and Partner countries alike, as governments advance toward the frontier of sound practice in the various areas of public governance.

With this Framework, the OECD seeks to bear witness to the different practices that countries have developed – and continue to develop – to ensure that their institutional and decision-making arrangements lead to improving results for people: better policies – through better governance – for better lives.

References

[71] European Commission (2017), Toolbox 2017 edition - Quality of Public administration, Publications Office of the European Union,Luxembourg, http://dx.doi.org/10.2767/483489

[3] Meuleman, L. (2018), Metagovernance for sustainability : a framework for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals, Routledge.

[1] OECD (2017), Government at a Glance 2017, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/gov_glance-2017-en.

[2] OECD (2017), Systems Approaches to Public Sector Challenges: Working with Change, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264279865-en.

[4] OECD (2016), The Governance of Inclusive Growth, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264257993-en.

[5] SIGMA (2017), The Principles of Public Administration 2017 edition, http://www.oecd.org/termsandconditions. (accessed on 4 October 2019).

[6] United Nations (2018), Principles of effective governance for sustainable development, Economic and Social Council, Official Recors 2018, Supplement No. 24, E/2018/44-E/C.16/2018/8, para. 3.

Note

← 1.  The Public Governance Committee and Regulatory Policy Committee are responsible for a combined seventeen OECD Council Recommendations and one Declaration. For the full list, please visit: https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments?mode=advanced&committeeIds=863,7497&dateType=adoption.