Analysing and Addressing Governance in Sector Operations
The European Commission (EC) and EU Member States invest a considerable amount of aid in various sectors. These include e.g. health, water and sanitation, education, and transport. In recent years, other sectors of intervention have come to the forefront, attracting growing levels of support (e.g. forestry, mining, migration and security sector reform). Getting results in all these policy areas is critical to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.
Yet ensuring sustainable results with sector aid is a challenging task. Often the issue is not a lack of good ideas and funding, but political constraints and institutional issues in and beyond the sector, or what are broadly termed ‘governance’ issues. Sector programmes sometimes face challenges because the governance environment is not conducive to them. It is therefore becoming a key consideration for EC sector specialists to ensure that governance is adequately addressed in their sector. Some sector specialists claim that ‘70 % of what we are doing in our sector is actually related to governance’.
Building on existing sector experience, this document seeks to offer guidance to EC sector specialists on how to address governance in sector operations in
a more systematic and comprehensive way.
Its objectives are twofold:
(i) to strengthen the understanding of governance issues at sector level
(ii) to increase the capacity of EC staff at Headquarters and in Delegations to analyse and address governance in EC support to various sectors.
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