3. Understanding country and reform context

There is a growing awareness amongst international donor agencies and partners in government and civil society that policy reform should be based on a better understanding of country and reform contexts. At the “macro” level of country and reform context, broad, upstream country analysis that examines the political landscape can be complemented by more specific analysis of the context for a particular type of reform. Here we introduce approaches adopted for country analysis (Section 3.1) and describe a number of tools that can be employed to assess the stakeholders and their interests at the macro level (Section 3.2) and to examine the institutions that govern the reform context (Section 3.3).