Examining the adoption of governance reforms in Nepal: Success or failure in the post-liberalisation era (1990-2015)?

Abstract

Governance reforms face serious implementation challenges across the entire globe, but are particularly difficult for developing countries. Yet this problem is a relatively less well studied area of implementation research both at the global level and, in developing countries such as Nepal. This research project examines the key factors that contributed to, or inhibited, the implementation of governance reforms in post-liberalised Nepal (1990 - 2015) in three key areas: the downsizing of the civil service (often labelled as ‘rightsizing’), the privatisation of public enterprises, and various anti-corruption reforms applying across the public service. To this end, an analytical framework was designed based on an extensive review and analysis of the existing literature on political economy, state-society relations, political regimes, theory of policy transfer, framework for policy success or failure and the making and implementation of policy reforms. The framework allowed for an in-depth analysis of the interests, incentives, motives, power and the behaviour of the key policy actors and stakeholders. Questionnaire surveys and focus group discussions on the case studies, and 100 in-depth elite interviews focusing political and bureaucratic elites with first-hand knowledge and experience of the policy reforms, provide an evidential basis for the findings. The main findings of this thesis demonstrate that Nepal's governance reforms were largely not effective in the areas investigated. The three cases reveal common problems in the conceptual understanding and the translation of reform objectives into action by the main implementers. The absence of high level, genuine commitment to reform on the part of political and bureaucratic leaders, the lack of evidence-based policy-making and hasty commencement without considering reform readiness were among the key factors inhibiting governance reforms in the post-liberalisation era, thus preventing them from achieving their reform objectives. Some inhibiting factors applied more specifically to individual cases. The key issue for the rightsizing reforms was due to policy distortion by the senior civil servants; privatisation suffered from partial implementation; whereas the anti-corruption reforms lacked societal pressure and effective accountability enforcement mechanisms to get those policies effectively implemented. Hence, the rightsizing reform agenda became primarily a case of implementation failure, whereas the other two cases constituted a failure to implement. These findings demonstrate the need for in-depth analysis of individual cases to fully grasp the intricate politics of governance reforms in aid-recipient developing countries like Nepal. This thesis contributes to the existing body of knowledge on the politics of the agenda-setting process and implementation of governance reforms as a dynamic political process through the analysis of a comprehensive political economy framework. It also contributes to the policy transfer literature by expanding the existing policy transfer framework. Similarly, albeit in a small scale, it also contributes to the policy success or failure literature by positing a dynamic perspective to the evaluation of success or failure of governance reforms that combines the criteria-based assessment with ‘thick interpretations’ of reform outcomes. The research findings have important implications to other similar developing countries to improve the implementation of governance reforms. Show more