Why Public Policies often fail in Nepal?

 

Bishnu Raj Upreti[1]

The context

Public policy in general is conceptual roadmap for government to address specific public concerns and or deliver specific constitutional mandates and it provides framework for ensuring legal, institutional, procedural, and resources (both human and financial) required to deliver the commitments of the particular public policy. Effectiveness of Nepal’s public polices to be examined within this definitional framework.

Since two years, I am heavily engaged in reviewing public polices, comparing existing different public polices and reviewing several new draft polices prepared by different ministries and government agencies. This process helped to understand how they are formulated, why they are formulated in that particular way, how effective they are implemented and why they are failed. In this article I am reflecting why often public polices fail in Nepal.

 

Reasons of public policies’ failure

I found the following major reasons of ineffectiveness or even failure of public polices in Nepal:

1)      Weakness in the policy formulation process: lack of proper need assessment and weak prioritization, no sincere risk and opportunities assessment, not even proper definition of policy, no proper consultation of key stakeholders to collect their concerns and voices resulting into lack of ownership, very top down process leading to few formal activities to meet the legal/procedural requirement, time pressure for quick delivery of policy, etc. Right policy formulation process often leads to higher possibility for effective implementation and vice versa. Hence, one of the major reasons of failure of public policy is lack of adapting right process.

2)      Inconsistencies in content of policy formulation: Once there is lack of proper need identification, analysis and prioritization, appropriate risk assessment, lack of conceptual clarity in absence of definition, there is always possibility of inconsistencies and flows/vagueness in the content.  Because of lack of conceptual clarity, whole document as well as individual policy statement is called as policy.  Many times the logical sequencing between a) policy statement, b) strategies and c) implementing guidelines are weak or missing, very vague statement with similar meaning are presented in policy statements, strategies and implementing guidelines.

3)      Institutional mechanism: In most of the polices, there is no clear responsibilities of responsible institutions outlined & agreed and therefore creating confusion and lack of ownership in implementation. Most of polices require engagement of several inter-ministerial institutions and policies brought by one ministries with the responsibilities of implementation by another ministry is one of the main dysfunctional policy.

4)      Legal provisions: Several policy provisions demand legal back up for successful implementation. But most of the polices are prepared without proper assessment of legal situation (do any existing laws inhibit implementation, does now law required to implement the policy etc.). Hence, once policy are promulgated, many time existing laws prohibits (e.g., forest law or park and people law) implementation or new laws are required. This situation must has assessed while making policy and clear legal provisions required to implement specific policy must be outlined in the policy. Further, unlike laws, there is on provision of punishment to concerned officials if he or she fails to implement particular policy that is giving impunity for them not to implement.   

5)      Coordination: Lack of inter-ministerial and inter-agency coordination is another big barrier to implement policy effectively, as scope of most of the policies (e.g., agriculture policy, urban development policy, water, sanitation and hygiene policy, etc.) go beyond mandate of single ministry (e.g., Ministry of agriculture, ministry of irrigation, ministry of industries, trade and supply, ministry of finance, ministry of foreign affairs, ministry of home affairs are related with agriculture policy). Hence, if proper consultation with concerned ministers at the beginning of policy formulation is not done and clear commitment is not ensured, policy will not work.

6)      Resources provisions: Many policies at the time of formulation do not assess the tentative financial and human resources requirements. Without proper projection of resources requires implementing the policy, possibility of its failure is high.

7)      Time required for public policy formulation: Often Nepal’s public policies are promulgated in very short time (few weeks to hardly few months) leaving aside important public consultation process because of pressure from minsters that ultimately lacks public ownership and fails. Depending on the gravity of topic,  time span for a policy formulation process requires 9 months and up to 10 years (for policies’ that arte directly related with large number of people, such as agriculture/health and sanitation, etc.). 

8)      Monitoring and evaluation: In most of the policy mention about monitoring and evaluation but no indicators (what to monitor/evaluate), no time frame (when to do), who is responsible so it remains simply as jargon statement.

9)      Supplementary elaborations and documents: Complex polices require supplementary documents (strategies, guidelines, procedures etc.) that are not indicated in the policies, affect policy implementation.

 

Ways ahead

Existing practice of policy formulation must be change if we want to see public policy implemented. In this context, Policy Research Institute (PRI) has developed two guidelines related to public polices: one related to formulation of public polices and another related to reviewing public policies, to assist government ministries. Very brief synopsis of public policy formulation cycle is presented below:

Public Policy Formulation to follow the ‘Public Policy Formation Cycle’ that starts with

a)      identification and analysis of policy issues,

b)      prioritization of policy issues,

c)      preliminary draft as per the standard format (developed by Policy Research Institute),

d)      call for public to give feedback and public dialogue over the preliminary draft,

e)      revision of the  preliminary draft based on the public feedback,

f)       review of the revised draft by team of experts and adaptation of draft,

g)      circulation at public for their comments and feedback on the draft (sending to all key stakeholders and requesting for their feedback and organization of series of feedback meetings with stakeholders),

h)      revision of the draft policy for finalization,

i)       submission of the draft to cabinet committee for approval,

j)       policy implementation,

k)      policy evaluation (after 5 years of implementation) and decision of continuity, revision or new policy need.

Completion of this process generally requires about 9 months and in case of policies dealing with to concerns of large population such as health policy, agriculture policy, drinking water and sanitation policies, education policies requires years of continuous consultation and public debate.    Now Nepal need to change the present practice of policy formulation in terms of process, content, expected outcomes. 

 

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[1] Bishnu Raj Upreti is presently serving as Executive Chairperson of the Policy Research Institute, a Think Tank of Government.