PUBLIC SECTOR MANAGEMENT

Improving all aspects of governance is vital to reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development for the benefit of poor women, men and children. The public sector is at the heart of this challenge. The quality of public-sector management and administration is crucial to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, as public-sector entities are, in most countries, responsible for delivering services, such as health and education, for laying down a regulatory framework that fosters private-sector development, for ensuring and upholding the rule of law, as well as for promoting gender equality.

The challenges faced by the public sector in developing countries are significant. Poor service delivery is a visible sign of this, as is corruption. Capacity must be developed, not necessarily to expand the public sector, but to help nurture an effective and accountable public sector capable of contributing to the reduction of poverty.

Processes of change, aimed at improving governance and reducing poverty, take time and have to be built from within each country. The public sector is obviously at the core of these processes. However, on its own, the public sector cannot deliver results. Civil-society groups and other non-state actors, such as the private sector and the media, are critical in holding the public sector accountable and in advocating needs and priorities.

The vision of the Danish support to strengthening public sector performance in partner countries is embedded in the 2007 strategy “Effective and Accountable Public-Sector Management – Strategic Priorities for Danish Support to Good Governance”. Specifically, the strategy defines three core areas for support to public-sector management:

• the fight against corruption
• local service delivery and governance
• public financial management

In these three areas, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs will seek to develop particular competencies and expertise to become a competent, relevant and respected partner capable of acting as lead donor at the level of partner countries and internationally. Accordingly, Denmark will be less ambitious in terms of technical capacity in other areas of public-sector management.

The following principles guide the Danish support to public sector management in partner countries,

• Promote the goal of poverty reduction, i.e. ensure that changes and reforms are as pro-poor, gender sensitive and environmentally sustainable as possible.
• Support public-sector management in all programme countries.
• Provide support in the three selected core areas based on an understanding of their interaction and interdependence with the governance situation as a whole.
• Make increased use of analyses of the political economy
• Base all support on thorough and preferably joint capacity assessments in order to adapt the provision of resources for capacity development to each situation.
• Facilitate and support the active inclusion of the ‘demand side’ of governance in change and reform initiatives at the country level.
• Promote gender equality and special interventions aimed at supporting women’s equal access to resources, influence and rights in all interventions based on thorough analyses of opportunities and constraints.
• Apply the approaches of the Strategy to other Danish support for the partner countries, not least to the sector programme support.
• Intensify efforts at the international level to promote the principles enshrined in the Strategy
• Identify and implement actions that contribute to improving the governance of donors.
• Create easy access for the press, civil society and others in each partner country to information relating to the disbursement of Danish development assistance to national and other institutions and organisations in partner

For more details please check:

Aid Management Guidelines website on: Public Sector Management 

Public Sector Management Background Analysis