Capacity development is central to improving standards of living and reducing poverty in developing member countries. It is much more than just training or skills transfer; it is about effective institutions, a sound unpoliticized policy environment, accountability systems, effective relationships, and appropriate incentives. As noted in this study, capacity development should be firmly rooted in a country's political economy. It is a means to an end---the end being improved government performance.

The Clinton administration's National Performance Review of the federal government (also called the Reinventing Government Initiative) is the eleventh effort this century to improve the executive branch and reform the federal service. Most previous efforts have faltered. How can present and future recommendations avoid the same fate? This book provides practical and timely guidance to those trying to improve government performance. The focus of successful attempts, the authors argue, should be sustained evolution, not bursts of invention aimed at sweeping transformation. Specific proposals address ways to change government over the long term, ways to streamline bureaucracy, attract more resourceful and innovative workers, and make agencies more responsive to their customers, the citizens.

Citizen Satisfaction investigates the topic of satisfaction with government services from a variety of perspectives, using case studies and empirical results from satisfaction studies at the federal level.

In recent years, the developing world has seen a burst of efforts to reduce corruption, increase transparency and accountability, and improve governance. Needless to say, this is an important and encouraging development. However, the lack of a reliable compass to describe where a country is at a given moment—and where it could be heading in the absence or acceptance of proposed reforms—can result in disastrous missteps. The unfortunate absence of such a guide has helped lead to innumerable failed governments or ineffective regimes. This important book aims to fill that void. How to Improve Governance emphasizes the need for an overall analytical framework that can be applied to different countries to help analyze their current situations, identify potential areas for improvement, and assess their relative feasibility and the steps needed to promote them. A country-specific analysis needs to be comprehensive, in the sense that it includes the four concepts of transparency, accountability, governance, and anticorruption throughout the calculus. Without such an analytic framework, any reform attempt is likely to flounder for lack of a shared understanding of the underlying problems and of the feasible reforms. The book gives special emphasis to the potential for civil society groups to play a stronger role in holding governments accountable for their use of public resources, and to the importance of developing politically feasible, prioritized country strategies for reform. "Whether one looks at how to increase domestic demand for good governance, how to make government more accountable to the public, or how to build democratic processes that deliver results, the underlying issues are essentially the same.... As development actors of various types... seek to help, more and more of them are calling for a clearer conceptual framework to guide their efforts."—From the Introduction

Since 2010, the government has made a number of changes to its procurement structures and processes. There have been signs of good progress in key areas: expenditure on common goods and services is more centralised; participation by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has increased; and the Government Procurement Service is an improvement on its predecessor. The creation of a Chief Procurement Officer and associated positions has formed clearer lines of responsibility at the centre, and the Cabinet Office now has a firmer grip of procurement expenditure. Overall, the NAO expresses confidence in the Service's reported savings of £426 million in 2011-12 as a result of reductions in price owing to centralised procurement. Nevertheless, there have been problems in implementing the reforms, including ineffective governance structures, unrealistic targets, incomplete data and weaknesses in contract management. Government is not maximising the potential for savings through centralised procurement. There are some operational issues with GPS's management of the central contracts, with departments raising concerns about the inconsistency of contract management and the quality of customer service. And some weaknesses in implementation mean that the centralised approach is not releasing procurement resources in departments as originally expected. Roles and responsibilities for day-to-day contract management are unclear and there are inadequate mechanisms by which departments and the centre of government can hold each other to account. The Cabinet Office will have to lead a major cultural shift across government if the centralising of buying goods and services is to deliver the significant benefits on offer.

This book is about how new and underutilized types of big data sources can inform public policy decisions related to workforce development. Hawley describes how government is currently using data to inform decisions about the workforce at the state and local levels. He then moves beyond standardized performance metrics designed to serve federal agency requirements and discusses how government can improve data gathering and analysis to provide better, up-to-date information for government decision making.