Enhancing the quality of public service delivery : insights from recent research

Good policies are necessary but insufficient for delivering high quality public services. Building organizations capable of implementing increasingly complex policies at scale is crucial. But most developing countries lack such organizations and – alarmingly – most are not improving. Effective reforms in China, Singapore, and Vietnam, however, and from unlikely service delivery successes elsewhere, suggest that three key factors are essential to building implementation capability: beginning with problems nominated and prioritized by local staff; promoting iterative experimentation to identify a range of plausible alternatives; and sharing emerging solutions through a frontline community of practice. These factors also suggest there is much to be gainedfrom embedding researchers into delivery systems themselves, the better to understand context, to map and explain variation, and to facilitate real-time decision making in response to changing realities.