24 research outputs found
When does the state listen?
In this brief, Lucas Katera looks at the barriers Tanzanian citizens and other nonstate actors face in trying to make the state listen to their voices. He focused his research on the design and implementation of primary education policies and programmes in Tanzania since the beginning of multiparty democracy in 1995. He analysed the content of various publications on primary education policies, looking for the voices of nonstate actors in government publications. He complemented this by interviewing key individuals, including government officials in the education sector, retired government officials who were in office during the design and implementation of post-1995 policies and programmes, as well as researchers and civil society actors working in the education sector. The research concludes that policymaking is a top-down affair in Tanzania, where there is an antagonistic relationship between state and non-state actors. Despite acknowledging, of late, the importance of non-state actors in guiding government education policies, the government often thinks of competition instead of cooperation when it interacts with non-state actors. Whereas part of this mistrust comes from a sensitive state, non-state actors at times do not help the situation with critical and confrontational advocacy efforts.UK Department for International Development (DFID)
US Agency for International Development (USAID)
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)
Omidyar Networ
Petroleum’s potential impact on future state-society relations in Tanzania
Tanzanian citizens continue to have high expectations about the benefits that the country’s emerging petroleum sector will provide them with, yet they possess low knowledge about the sector. Policy makers should take concrete steps to rectify this knowledge-expectation gap by providing updated information in accessible and easy-to-understand formats. Revenue transparency should be encouraged, and more research should be carried out to improve understanding of how the prospect of future petroleum revenues may shape citizen attitudes and behaviors
Cursed before production?
Big discoveries of high value natural resources can have negative economic, political, and social effects long before full production of a resource begins. While Tanzania has already experienced some tensions around the country’s gas discovery, there is consensus among scholars and practitioners that the country has thus far generally avoided experiencing economic and political problems because of the discovery. Political risks remain, however, and continued immunity to the pre-source curse, and ultimately to the resource curse, will require ongoing, sound political decisionmaking about how to react to the promise of potentially large future resource revenues
Civil society’s role in petroleum sector governance: The case of Tanzania
Good governance in the management of natural resources is now recognized by scholars and policy makers as key to ensuring that countries can prevent and escape the resource curse and translate resource wealth into inclusive economic development. Civil society is considered a key actor in ensuring good natural resource governance. Civil society organizations (CSOs) provide information, have moral legitimacy to set the resource governance agenda, can help to democratize power in resource management, and can work to keep other resource governance actors like government and companies accountable. Donors can support these critical functions of CSOs in the Tanzanian context by continuing to provide financial and political support to CSOs, and by involving them in debate and policy making. In the current political environment, it is vital that donors continue to communicate to the Government of Tanzania the importance of CSO involvement in governing the country’s petroleum sector
Policy implementation under stress: Central-local government relations in property tax collection in Tanzania
Inter-organisational cooperation in revenue collection has received limited attention in the tax administration literature. Recent experiences from Tanzania offer a unique opportunity to examine opportunities and challenges facing such cooperation between central and local government agencies in a developing country context. The administration of property taxes (PT) in Tanzania has been oscillating between decentralised and centralised collection regimes. The paper examines how inter-organisational cooperation influenced implementation of the reforms. Two lessons of broader relevance for policy implementation and PT administration are highlighted. First, institutional trust matters. In Tanzania, top-down reform processes, ambiguity related to the rationale behind the reforms, and lack of consultations on the roles and expectations, have acted as barriers to constructive working relationships between the local and central government revenue agencies. Second, administrative constraints, reflected in poor preparation, outdated property registers and valuation rolls, and inadequate incentives for the involved agencies to cooperate hampered the implementation of the reforms
When Does the State Listen?
In this article, we look at four cases of key historical policies in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania to examine how states engage with citizen voices. The policies all took place in contexts of political change and major junctures of democratisation. We identify three kinds of moments when the state listens: hearing moments, when it engages with citizen voices but does not change the way it acts; consultation moments, when it engages with citizen voices through two-way dialogue, resulting in one-sided action; and concertation moments, when coalitions between reform-minded officials and politicians and organised citizen voices engage in two-way dialogue and action for accountable governance. Concertation moments occurred when there was a shared sense of urgency and a common goal across state and non-state actors, and despite different understandings of accountable governance. But concertation moments are also laborious and temporary, part of larger, ever-changing policy processes, and often states revert to consultation or hearing
How to overcome rent seeking in Tanzania’s skills sector? Exploring feasible reforms through discrete choice experiments
Skills gaps and mismatches are widely documented as a hindrance to inclusive structural transformation across developing countries, especially in Africa. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that skills development is a complex political economy process challenged by institutional and financing problems on the supply side, and inadequate demand, that is, a shortage of firms that can organise skilled labour and provide on-the-job training effectively. In such adverse contexts, rent seeking and corruption may arise from conflicting objectives, trade-offs and mis-aligned incentives among stakeholders – public sector skills providers and firms. With a focus on Tanzania, we (i) analyse the incentive structures underlying such rule-breaking behaviours and processes, and (ii) empirically test alternative institutional design strategies that would better align the interests of different stakeholders towards improved skills development outcomes. Building on over 30 in-depth stakeholder interviews in 2018, we conducted three Discrete Choice Experiments with over 200 firms to test the feasibility of different incentive packages in 2019. Our main hypothesis is that the successful re-alignment of stakeholders’ incentives must consider both the different and potentially conflicting objectives of public training institutions and the heterogeneity in skills needs and capabilities of different types of firms. We uncover latent preference structures differentiated by observable firm characteristics, most strongly by differences in technical capabilities, existing training provision and firm size. We conclude advancing an evidence-based tailored skills policy reform