PUBLIC POLICY BLOCKAGES AND CHALLENGES IN NEPAL Mohan Das Manandhar © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Generic Problems in Nepali Public Policy Making Processes Failure of implementation Lack of or too much ownership of policy framer Party Fundamentalism/unwillingness to accommodate Limited research and analysis to feed policy Failure of representation Donors’ influence (continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Generic Problems in Nepali Public Policy Making Processes Over bureaucratization/discretion Lack of Accountability Kathmandu-centric policy making Lack of discourse on public interest Lack of institutional coordination Lack of capacity of civic orgs/political leaders to effectively engage in policy © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Key Policy Blockages in Nepal Representation Implementation Accountability © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Key Public Policy Blockages: Representation Failure to represent all interests in the policy formulation and deliberation stage— or a lack of institutionalized channels for affected groups to articulate their problems, needs, and proposed solutions. This lack perhaps stems from and also perpetuates a kind of back channel, relationship-based decision making, and forecloses the possibility of orderly, reasoned, rule-based, negotiated policy formulation. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Key Public Policy Blockages: implementation Failure to convert formal decisions (such as parliamentary laws, Supreme Court decisions, and regulatory directives) into specific rules and operational procedures that can be implemented by mid and lower- level actors. This has led to extreme frustration with the political system, and it contributes to the “bureaucratic dominance” and “uncontrolled discretionary behaviour” that many of informants identified. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

Key Public Policy Blockages: accountability Lack of oversight, monitoring, enforcement and accountability. This problem means that even when very specific policies or directives are passed, there is little knowledge or information gathering about how a policy is working, and little capacity for self-correction. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

An Ideal Model Public Policymaking in a democracy must fulfill three key functions: Representation Implementation Accountability © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

An Ideal Model Representation: Citizens must have a way to make their problems and needs known to government officials, and a way to make demands on officials to use government to address their problems. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

An Ideal Model Implementation: Once public officials pass laws and regulations, there must be systems for putting these policies into practice, or to put it another way, for translating words on paper into human actions. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

An Ideal Model Accountability: There must be mechanisms by which officials are monitored, evaluated, and sanctioned when they have not met their responsibilities to carry out policy. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

PUBLIC POLICY BLOCKAGES AND CHALLENGES In the dominant Western liberal tradition, the public sphere is seen as the aggregation of individual interests, and public problems are those problems that many individuals have in common. Less prevalent communitarian notions of “public” start from the premise that a community has its own life as an entity, so that the meaning of “public” is more than sum of individual interests. Importantly, in both views, the purpose of government is to make policy that serves the people. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

PUBLIC POLICY BLOCKAGES AND CHALLENGES In Nepal, there are multiple notions of the public that express some sense of commonness and shared experience, but that don’t correspond with the Western idea of public in “public policy.” Samudayik connotes local community; samajik connotes social relationships; and sarkari connotes government in the sense of public enterprises. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

PUBLIC POLICY BLOCKAGES AND CHALLENGES There has been little belief in the idea that government serves the people. The Rana regime believed quite the opposite—that the state and the populace belonged to them—and therefore they designed the governing apparatus to serve their needs, not the people’s needs or the public interest. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

REPRESENTATION Representation should enable citizens to express their needs and convert their needs into demands on government. The substitution of obstructionist protest for regular channels of citizen communication with government is a key problem in representation. Lack of local elections is perhaps the major deficiency in representation. (continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

REPRESENTATION There is a lack of consensus among parties on national issues. Party politics are based on relationships rather than programs. In order to maximize their share of votes, party politicians convey different messages and platforms to different constituencies. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

IMPLEMENTATION Many of the blockages in implementation derive from the same problems that hinder effective representation. For most policies, there is no clear statutory definition of responsibility for implementation, and no procedures and time limits for issuing directives or guidelines to lower-level officials. (continues) “We have good policies on paper but they are not implemented well.” © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

IMPLEMENTATION A very common statement-- “We have good policies on paper but they are not implemented well.” Rent-seeking derails effective implementation. Civil servants and party leaders use their broad discretionary power to serve their own interests. “Excessive politicization of implementation,” especially, control of implementation by party cadres. (continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

IMPLEMENTATION There is a kind of excessive centralization. There are significant communication barriers between bureaucrats and political officials (ministers), and the motives of the two groups may not be aligned. Lack of coordinated planning, infrastructure and financing arrangements. (continues) “We have excellent laws but they do not get implemented” © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

IMPLEMENTATION Effective implementation requires adequate resources. Resource inadequacies are matters of perception, willingness to pay, and rising expectations. Weaknesses on the citizen demand side. (continues) “We have excellent laws but they do not get implemented” © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

IMPLEMENTATION In sum, we have identified three types of blockages to effective implementation: systemic problems (instability, excessive centralization, and corruption); lack of clear delineation of implementation responsibilities and guidelines; and weakness of citizen demand for the programs promised in policy declarations. “We have excellent laws but they do not get implemented” © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

ACCOUNTABILITY The concept of accountability is not much articulated in Nepal’s popular discourse. Two kinds of blockages to accountability : cultural and institutional. (Continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

ACCOUNTABILITY Several cultural codes affect the practice of accountability, especially kinship-based patronage (afnomanchhe); loyalty-based distribution of positions and resources (the chakari system); and ethno-centrism, which results in privileging of members of one’s ethnic or caste group in all interactions, whether official or personal. (Continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

ACCOUNTABILITY The lack of mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement. There is little public awareness about accountability. Citizens have little knowledge about their rights and privileges vis-à-vis public institutions, and there is no established tradition for formal and targeted questioning into the actions of public officials and authorities. The lack of mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement. (Continues) © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

ACCOUNTABILITY Lack of Accurate and honest record- keeping—the basic element of transparency. The officials responsible for monitoring lack the critical independence from the people whose behavior they are supposed to monitor because they depend on these same people for their job security. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

ACCOUNTABILITY There is the question of “accountable to whom”? Because Nepal is so heavily dependent on foreign aid (about 40 percent of all public expenditures), lines of accountability become blurred and run in different directions. As a recipient government, Nepal’s agencies and officials must be “more accountable” to donors and lenders than to their own citizens in order to keep the money flowing. © 2019 NITI FOUNDATION 2019-04-02

THANK YOU www.nitifoundation.org mohan@nitifoundation.org 2019-04-02