• Legal & judicial reform

Legal & judicial reform

Judicial and legal reform is now recognised as foundational in all governance and economic development strategies. This paper identifies the dramatic growth in legal and judicial reform across the world of international development assistance, and assesses the experience of measuring performance in a substantial reform programme in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Using this as a case study of building capacity to monitor and evaluate legal and judicial reform in the development context, it offers some fundamental lessons for donors which relate to strategic capacity, incentives, sustainability, resources, timeframe and design approach

The authors note that measuring the success of development efforts is difficult, due to the long term nature of their objectives, such as, reforming the law, reducing street crime, training judges, improving court backlog, and raising awareness of human rights, where results only become visible overtime. However, the judicial reform programme in PNG highlights six lessons:

• strategic capacity - agencies were faced with large cultural and sustainability challenges, including a major shift in the way the traditional public sector organisations operate, in the move from input-focused to results-driven behaviour
  
• incentives - a number of incentives drive the engagement of stakeholders in sector performance monitoring, such as, involving civil society organisations in the development of sub-measures and collection of data creates an incentive for formal agencies to be more responsive to civil society as important stakeholders, not merely passive recipients of services
  
• sustainability – the sector monitoring regime draws on data from constituent agencies for at least 60% of its sub-measures, and working within agency systems makes for local management of the process, creating sustainability within the relatively short term
  
• resources – costing the different agencies’ investment in sector performance monitoring and thereby evaluating individual contribution is not altogether straightforward
  
• timeframe - the time required to design, establish and develop a sector-based performance monitoring framework is relatively substantial; in this case it has required five years, and it was only after three years that the baseline data for key performance indicators was settled, gathered and available for measurement, enabling trend analysis
  
• design approach - the shift from the prevalent logistic framework (log-frame) approach to a new sector-based performance paradigm means the process is no longer driven by the donor’s own design approach, but by the impact of any development contribution on the overall performance of the sector

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