Volume 1: A Conceptual Framework

Volume 1 of the Sourcebook presents a conceptual overview of the elements that make up institutional, political and social analysis for PSIA. Volume 1 is organised as follows. Part 1 introduces the Sourcebook, explaining that it is designed to fill a perceived gap amongst practitioners in guidance on institutional, political and social analysis and is intended to complement the guidance provided in the World Bank’s existing economic toolkit (Bourgignon and da Silva, 2003). Part 2  introduces PSIA and its main objectives and briefly reviews the World Bank User’s Guide to PSIA (World Bank, 2003a), focusing on three important areas for robust PSIA: establishing the counterfactual, identifying transmission channels and identifying direct and indirect impacts of policy reform. In addition to the five transmission channels identified by the User’s Guide, this sourcebook introduces a sixth channel for cases where authority – comprising power, structures and processes – is directly changed through policy reforms, notably through civil service reform, decentralisation and other similar institutional reforms.

The remainder of the Sourcebook presents technical guidance at three levels of analysis, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Part 3 introduces tools for macro-level analysis of the country and reform context, Part 4 describes tools for analysing the meso-level processes of policy implementation and Part 5 introduces tools for analysing the meso- and micro-level impact of policy reform. Part 6 shows how this analysis can be used to assess the risk to policy reform. Part 7 briefly concludes. A bibliography of useful reference material is provided.