Implementation Report Government Effectiveness, Ministerial Compliance, Monitoring Ministries, Monitoring Agencies|Bureaucracies, Task Funding, m o c . Constitutional Discretion, National Standards, Regulatory Enforcement e b o d a . k c Sustainable Governance o t s - e g Indicators 2020 e v © Sustainable Governance SGI Indicators SGI 2020 | 2 Implementation Indicator Government Effectiveness Question To what extent can the government achieve its own policy objectives? 41 OECD and EU countries are sorted according to their performance on a scale from 10 (best) to 1 (lowest). This scale is tied to four qualitative evaluation levels. 10-9 = The government can largely implement its own policy objectives. 8-6 = The government is partly successful in implementing its policy objectives or can implement some of its policy objectives. 5-3 = The government partly fails to implement its objectives or fails to implement several policy objectives. 2-1 = The government largely fails to implement its policy objectives. Germany Score 9 The current government agreed on its coalition contract on 7 February 2018. The coalition contract comprised 175 pages and touched upon nearly all possible policy topics. The coalition contract notes that after two years, the government is to take stock and examine the progress made to that point. Thus, in November 2019, the government came up with a positive balance sheet. A month previously, government policies were validated by a study conducted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) that also gave the government a positive assessment. The study stressed that the government had implemented or substantially initiated more than two-thirds of the promises laid down in its coalition contract. Both parties were able to translate slightly more than 50% of their electoral promises. However, opinion polls make clear that the public is not cognizant of this high implementation rate. Citation: Bertelsmannstiftung (2019): https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/themen/aktuelle-meldungen/2019/august/besser-als-ihr-ruf-groko-setzt-ihre- versprechen-zuegig-um/ Latvia Score 9 The government has a good track record in achieving its own policy objectives. In issue areas considered by the government as high priority – recent examples include economic recovery, euro zone entry criteria, budget reform and fiscal discipline, OECD entry requirements – government performance can be considered excellent. The government has proven to be particularly efficient in implementing policies that SGI 2020 | 3 Implementation have been recommended by international partners (the European Union, NATO, Council of Europe and OECD). However, second-tier policy objectives show mixed success rates. For example, despite the fact that successive government declarations have identified education reform as a policy priority, little demonstrable progress has been made toward fulfilling the outlined policy objectives. Furthermore, in the prime minister’s annual reports to the parliament in 2012, 2013 and 2014, no significant education policy achievements were recognized. In 2016, however, a reform of the teacher compensation system was passed and significant curriculum reform is currently being implemented. Opposition to the implementation of education-policy objectives has been strong not only on the part of stakeholder groups and opposition parties, but also among the government coalition parties’ own parliamentarians. The PKC monitors progress with respect to government-declaration goals on an annual basis, providing a report to the prime minister. In 2015 this report included an evaluation of Latvia’s progress toward its long-term development goals (including the National Development Plan 2020 and the Latvia 2030 long-term development strategy). The prime minister provided parliament with a progress report on 24 separate performance indicators, reporting good progress in nine cases, adequate/weak performance in 10 cases, and poor performance in eight cases, requiring a reprioritizing or revision of policy measures. The NAP2020 mid-term evaluation noted that despite some successes in achieving several goals set out in the plan (e.g., ICT and e-governance), other goals have not been achieved and will likely not be achieved before the end of 2020. For example, in the science, research and innovation policy field, the level of investment has continued to decline, in stark contrast to the projected investment in 2014. This creates the conditions that lead to weak performance, and the outflow of knowledge and highly skilled professionals to other countries (i.e., “brain drain”). Similarly, developments in general education have been insufficient as has the reduction of general emigration levels. Sweden Score 9 The implementation capacity of the Swedish government is strong. The circa 340 executive agencies are the key actors in the implementation of policy. Over the past few years, the departments have increased the steering of their agencies. Also, performance measurement and management have become increasingly important in monitoring the agencies and the implementation process. Yet like the challenge of efficient policy coordination, policy implementation is also a challenge under the restrictions of new governance forms. The relationship between the government and the agencies no longer follows a strict command and SGI 2020 | 4 Implementation control pattern; rather, it is a more interactive form of governance where departments utilize the expertise in the agencies during the early stages of the policy process. This pattern is largely due to the fact that policy expertise is located not just in the departments but also in the agencies. The total number of staff in the departments is about 4,600, whereas the number of staff at the agency level is about 225,000. To a large extent, and with considerable variation among policy sectors and even specific issues, agencies provide informal advice to government on policy design. In some cases, there is a weekly dialogue between departments and agencies, not just on what departments want agencies to do, but also on matters of policy design. This means effectively that agencies are involved in shaping the policies they will later implement. This arrangement obviously increases the agencies’ commitment to a policy, but at the same time it complicates the implementation process. The main challenge in implementing government policies is not institutional but rather political. Neither the current nor previous red-green coalition government has held a majority of seats in the parliament. As a consequence, policy proposals have had to be negotiated with opposition parties. If all opposition parties unite against the government, the government’s proposals will be defeated. The complexity of this parliamentary situation has significantly complicated the policy process, especially as the situation was further exacerbated by the inconclusive 2018 election results. After lengthy negotiations, the red-green government struck a deal with the Center Party and the Liberals in January 2019, the so-called January Accord. Under the deal, the government has agreed to implement several distinctly liberal or neoliberal reforms. Thus, while the capacity of the government to implement its policies remains strong, those policies now represent a rather broad spectrum of the party system. Citation: Jacobsson, B., J. Pierre and G. Sundström (2015), Governing the Embedded State (Oxford: Oxford Universirty Press). Premfors, R. and G. Sundström (2007), Regeringskansliet (Malmö: Liber). Switzerland Score 9 The Swiss polity contains many different potential veto points, including political parties, cantons that have veto power in the second chamber, and interest groups with the power to trigger a referendum. Thus, the government must hammer out compromises carefully when drafting legislation. This is done in the pre- parliamentary stage of legislation. Once a bill is introduced into parliament, many of the necessary compromises have already been reached. For this reason, a substantial number of bills are passed in parliament without being modified. Actual implementation then takes place at the cantonal level. The cantons formulate and decide upon an implementation act for each federal law, a process very similar to SGI 2020 | 5 Implementation the EU transposition process and in which cantons enjoy large discretion. The actual policy delivery for almost all policies is in the hands of the cantons. Citation: Sager, F., & Thomann, E. (2016). “A Multiple Streams Approach to Member State Implementation Research: Politics, Problem Construction and Policy Paths in Swiss Asylum Policy,” Journal of Public Policy, 37(3): 287-314. doi: doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X1600009X Sager, F., Ingold, K. & Balthasar, A. (2017). Policy-Analyse in der Schweiz. Besonderheiten, Theorien, Beispiele. Zürich: NZZ Verlag, Reihe „Politik und Gesellschaft in der Schweiz“. Australia Score 8 In May 2019, the Liberal-National Party coalition government was reelected, despite pre-election opinion polls predicting a win for the opposition Labor Party. The victory was such a surprise to the coalition that it had a very limited policy agenda prepared, essentially consisting of income-tax cuts that for the most part will not arrive until after the next election. Notwithstanding the absence of a substantial policy agenda, the government has largely been able to achieve its (limited) policy objectives since the May 2019 election. While there is no doubt