4 key strategies for making public spending count: Part 4

This post is written by Sophie Abache, Digital Strategist and Content Manager at Open Contracting Partnership.

• The problem: Reforms often suffer challenges and setbacks because change is hard to institutionalise at this scale.

• Why it matters: Public procurement reforms, even though they take time and a lot of effort, are key to building a better world for all people.

• The solution: Measure your progress, seek stakeholder feedback, make the changes, and repeat until reforms become the norm.

Our world runs on public contracts. Whether it’s about better schools, fixing roads, buying protective equipment or delivering healthcare services, we need to make public spending count to create sustainable and equitable societies. But governments have struggled with antiquated procurement processes, poor coordination, and a lack of up-to-date and easy-to-access data on their procurement.

So how do you put in place a transparent, fair, inclusive, and results-driven public procurement system? The new Open Contracting Quickstart Guide pulls from our experience supporting more than 50 governments – from city agencies to federal governments – in implementing effective and efficient public procurement reforms.

In this four-part blog series, we highlight some of the strategies for how reformers can get up and running with open contracting – from the big fixes to the quick fixes. From setting goals, publishing data, engaging with stakeholders, and measuring success, we will share key strategies, tools and resources, and inspiring examples of open contracting efforts from around the globe. In the previous article, we looked at why stakeholder engagement and oversight is essential and some of the strategies to achieve this for 21st-century reforms. In this fourth part, we will look at practical strategies for measuring, adapting, and institutionalising reforms.

Strategy 4. Measure, adapt, and institutionalise reforms.

Change is hard. No matter how well you plan your open contracting reforms there will be setbacks and challenges. It is important for you to be agile, experimental, measure your efforts and their impact, and adapt your reforms. We share strategies to guide you through these as well as help you institutionalise reforms to make them more sustainable.

Have a simple MEL plan: Developing a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) plan will help you to track the progress of your reforms against specific goals and performance indicators, but also legal reforms, data publication and quality goals, or citizen participation. MEL plans are important to track early signs of measurable progress and pivot as needed to achieve your long-term goals. At OCP we support governments in creating MEL plans as it enables us to demonstrate to the mayor or the government and the public that their reform efforts are making a difference and helps them notice when an approach is not working.

"As you create your reform plan, consider what new policies, budgetary appropriation, and legislation changes you may need to achieve your goal."

In some cases, existing data will not be sufficient to determine key indicators and credible baselines so you have to stay creative and flexible. In Nepal, for example, a qualitative design approach using semi-structured interviews provided insights into the key challenges and enabled the government team to develop quantifiable indicators. You can get started tracking your progress by accessing the guidance used for our Lift impact accelerator program.

Use strategic communications to build support: Making the case for your project and communicating the news of your success can persuade sceptics and build support for the programme among key stakeholders, including the public. Ukraine’s ProZorro team says that communications were a crucial part of the team’s strong response during the COVID-19 crisis. They explained their progress and impact through traditional and social media channels, shared narrative case studies in accessible language, and created explanatory videos and project updates. Tailor your messages to build buy-in by using our Strategic Communications Plan template to think through your audiences and more.

Establish an inter-agency or multi-stakeholder working group: Multi-stakeholder working groups help generate external brainpower to aid reforms, align plans across sectors or departments, and importantly show that the government is open and willing to improve. When the pandemic struck, the Moldovan organisation Positive Initiative together with the community of over 30 civil organisations and government ministries that they lead was able to quickly respond and launch a platform to monitor COVID-19 emergency contracts. User-friendly dashboards reveal real-time insights that are most relevant to taxpayers and vendors, such as price comparisons, spending at each health facility, when items are delivered, and which companies are supplying them.

Getting started with establishing such a committee depends on the political environment in each country. For some inspiration, see how countries like Ukraine, the UK, and Uganda have formed these strategic partnerships.

Structure and share a comprehensive reform plan: Strong comprehensive reform plans help institutionalise reforms and make them sustainable through political transitions. The UK government’s green paper, Transforming Public Procurement, is a good template for laying out a systematic reform plan. It covers new legal principles for public procurement, simplifying procurement procedure types, establishing best value as opposed to best economic value for award decisions, new approaches to measuring the performance of contractors and KPIs for contracts, an improved review system for complaints, creation of a new oversight office, and new end-to-end digital transparency and open data for contracts.

As you create your reform plan, consider what new policies, budgetary appropriation, and legislation changes you may need to achieve your goal. You may need investments in capacity and resources as well to ensure lasting change. Communicate and engage users as you create and refine your plan so that your changes will help meet their needs.

Conclusion

As we wrap up this series of open contracting reforms strategies and you go out to conquer antiquated procurement systems and processes, remember that achieving impact takes time.

• Lasting reforms require that you define your reform goals and although most initiatives start with transparency efforts, improving public procurement systems requires wider and deeper changes.
• Make sure you have the right people in your team to achieve your goals - often this can mean looking outside your department or organisation. In fact, some of our most successful Lift teams are government-civil society partnerships. This shared ownership can help sustain change during the inevitable staffing and political transitions.
• Build e-procurement portals and business analytics tools that are based on the needs of relevant stakeholders for the long-term uptake of the system.
• Finally, prioritise stakeholder engagement. No transparency strategy is sustainable without effective and enforceable feedback mechanisms from the various actors. Civic monitoring and support will wane if the public lacks channels to voice their concerns and if the government doesn't have an ear to listen.

Access the complete Open Contracting Quickstart guide with 15 practical strategies for open, fairer, and better public procurement here.

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