December 6, 2017

Michael Moses, Director of Programs and Learning – Global Integrity and Sue Soal, independent consultant

An increasingly compelling body of evidence suggests that governance reform efforts are most likely to be successful when:

• Local stakeholders are at the forefront of defining governance challenges, developing and implementing solutions, and pursuing sustainable change; and
• Those stakeholders have the flexibility to learn and adapt as they go, especially when working in complex political contexts.

However, mainstream governance reform practice tends not to work in this way – often because external actors, including donors, INGOs, and multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP), are unclear on whether locally-owned, adaptive approaches are effective, and lack guidance on how they might apply such approaches in practice.

The evidence from Learning to Make All Voices Count (L-MAVC), a program funded by Making All Voices Count, and implemented in collaboration with Global Integrity – distilled into a series of interconnected lessons and implications for practice in our new policy brief – provides some suggestions on how these challenges might be overcome. Indeed, when applied in the long term, the lessons from L-MAVC could help strengthen the impact and effectiveness of both local reformers and the external actors – such as the OGP, donors, multilaterals, and others – that aim to support them.

For more, see the full brief, now available here.