About a month ago, Politics & Ideas and INASP invited government agencies to participate in an opportunity to improve the use of knowledge in policy through the application of a new diagnostic tool focused on how the context affects this type of efforts. This tool can help agencies clearly understand how a public institution is currently producing and using knowledge to inform policy, identify windows of opportunity for change, prioritize areas for improvement and co-design feasible change plans.
We received 22 applications from different agencies in Africa, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe, which offered a way array of very good and promising opportunities to work together with public agencies and in many cases, universities and think tanks as well.
The winning proposal was from the Secretariat for Public Administration of the Prime Minister’s Office in Peru, which is in charge of proposing, articulating, implementing and evaluating the National Policy for Public Management Modernization. They jointly applied with the Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), a consortium of 48 renown academic institutions and think tanks from Peru with a mission to produce and disseminate relevant research to impact public policy decisions.
Most of the applications were from individual agencies from line Ministries while some other were joint proposals of research centres and government agencies. We believe this demonstrates the level of interest and need for this type of work from government agencies. Since most of them were of very good quality INASP and Politics & Ideas will speak with all the applicants over coming months to explore potential ways to collaborate in the near future.
The potential of the SGP and CIES stood out: the SGP is in charge of proposing, articulating, implementing and evaluating the National Policy for Public Management Modernization, among other roles. As part of this effort, SGP deals with various policy topics so the reach involves several ministries and secretaries. The same applies to CIES since it develops inter-ministerial dialogues and studies performed by various think tanks and universities that are relevant for the entire public agenda.
Courtesy of Ricardo Cuppini under CC at flickr.com
We look forward to working with these two relevant organizations in Peru, and sharing outputs and what we learn throughout the process. Indeed, SGP and CIES set out their case that participation in this project will enable not only a revision and improvement of SGP’s role as a central department with relationships with multiple levels of government but it would also improve direct user feedback to the knowledge producer. It will also allow moving forward with SGP’s request for a systematized policy research online hub, as expressed by the partners. Furthermore, the diagnosis document and tailored change plan will help CIES implement a better dissemination strategy in the future.
Some key building blocks are already in place. With collaboration of USAID, a knowledge-management website has been designed, implemented and launched in the country. The partners are also in the process of producing policies and internal documents about how relevant knowledge should be produced, organized and published.
Moreover, the government of Peru has recently reinforced the importance of increasing citizen-experience in every policy making, public services and regulation towards all public entities. The partners believe that this creates a window of opportunity to frame their work and discussions using the systematic approach proposed by INASP and Politics & Ideas.
As a result of this exercise, SGP and CIES will receive:
A comprehensive and systematic diagnosis of their production and use of knowledge to inform policy
A document with prioritized areas for change
A tailored change plan, with concrete activities and methods to address the prioritized areas of change.
We will start sharing processes and findings of this pilot soon at our blogs, so those interested please stay tuned!
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