How development cooperation can support “managing for empowerment” and achieve better public sector performance

Dr. Dan Honig led a discussion on how development cooperation could support “management for empowerment” to achieve better development assistance. He presented his book, “Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People to Help Governments Do Better,” and explored the benefits of allowing public sector workers to perform their work driven by a desire to deliver on their agency’s goals. Aid agencies managed projects in (differentially) narrow ways, often requiring varieties of reporting that could crowd out judgment and undermine performance, particularly when tasks were hard to measure and monitor. This induced local government partners to use accountability systems that constrained mission-driven bureaucrats in recipient countries, inducing “management for compliance” rather than “management for empowerment.” Dr. Honig explored the role of autonomy, cultivating competence, purpose, and creating connection to peers in accountability systems that might best help partners attract, retain, and support high-performing “mission-driven bureaucrats.”

The dialogue included a discussion with Rebecka Kitzing-Ivarsson, who has a long career in the development sector and is currently working at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

About the speaker

Dr. Dan Honig has a long and travelled career within global development and public policy advocacy. Currently, Dr. Honig is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at University College London and at Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. He is a member of Georgetown’s Better Government Lab; a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development; an associate of Harvard’s Building State Capability Program; an SNF Agora Faculty Affiliate; a member of the Scholars Strategy Network; a senior fellow at Artha Global, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Policy, amongst other appointments. His work extends beyond academia, ranging from running a local non-profit focused on helping post-conflict youth in East Timor to being an advisor to successive Ministers of Finance in Liberia.

About the discussant

Rebecka Kitzing Ivarsson is currently Senior Advisor on Results Based Management & Adaptive Management at Sida. She has long experience from various organizations in the development sector, such as e.g. the UNDP, the Council of Europe and Swedish local and state authorities.

The moderator for this Dialogue on Development Research was Janet Vähämäki, Senior Research Fellow and Team Lead at SEI.