3 October 2012

New Zealand’s place on the 2012 Aid Transparency Index has improved on previous years.

The rationale for this index produced by PublishWhatYouFund, is that  “Transparency is essential if aid is to truly deliver on its promise.” The general assessment is that the efforts of those who give and receive, is undermined  because there is too little readily available information about aid.

Aid organisations are assessed using 43 indicators. The indicators are largely good governance matters, including measuring  information legislation, its operational effectiveness and openness, procurement strategies and whether the organisation publishes an annual report. As about a quarter of the 72 organisations involved are national governments, those with open government practices tend to rate better on the index.

The index has a 20 percentile scaling of “good”, “fair” “moderate”, poor” or “very poor”. This year, for the first time, two organisations have been rated as “good” – the World Bank and the U.K. Department for International Development. Nearly half of the organisations were rated as “poor” or “very poor”.

New Zealand in 16^th place, was at the top of the “moderate” group on the index, moving up from 30^th last year. Some of this appears to be from a recalibration of the index! But the commentary includes that. “…This is due to the publication of activity level information on their website in a format similar to the IATI standard, though it still needs some work to make it compatible and it is not currently published to the IATI Registry. New Zealand increased most significantly at the activity level, scoring on 60% of indicators; it only scored for one of 18 activity level indicators in the 2011 Index…”  (IATI it the International Aid Transparency Initiative).

Recommendations include that New Zealand should also consider joining Open Government Partnership. Interestingly, PublishWhatYouFund is co-located in the newly established OpenGovHub in Washington with Global Integrity, an NGO which is supporting implementation of the Open Government Partnership. The Indaba platform operated by Global Integrity was used for the index – putting into practice the coordination across NGOs which motivated the establishment of the OpenGovHub.

www.publishwhatyoufund.org/index/2012-index/

www.publishwhatyoufund.org/

www.publishwhatyoufund.org/index/2012-index/new-zealand/

http://foi-privacy.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/australian-foreign-aid-transparency.html

www.developmentgateway.org/news/announcing-opengov-hub

www.globalintegrity.org/

2 October 2012

Last week State Services Commission outlined how it will coordinate building a pipeline for promising senior leaders and future Public Service chief executives. More information about the programme is to be published this month and next.

There is an acknowledgment that the leadership development provisions in the State Sector Act 1988 were not a success. The programme anticipates the change in emphasis in the State Sector Amendment Bill which will give the State Services Commissioner responsibility  “…for creating and implementing a strategy for the development of senior leaders in the Public Service…”  The Bill proposes a flexible deployment of senior leaders with SSC designating positions in departments as key positions which must be filled by agreement between the relevant departmental chief executive and the State Services Commissioner.  A chief executive’s independence in matters relating to appointments would be subject to this requirement pertaining to key positions.

The SSC framework for senior leader career development involves a leadership success profile. The profile model identifies leaderful capacity being the delivery of results – through transformation, vision, people and self.

The ”self” portion of the leadership success profile includes an Integrity element… it is just a bit confusing in its specification.   The structure is engineered around providing better Public Service leaders but refers to State sector standards. The aspiration is that State sector integrity standards are maintained.  Is this intentionally broader than the State Services standards, which the State Services Commissioner has set as Head of the State Services and which even have a less demanding application to the non Public Service parts of the State Services?  If so this implicitly prioritises the status of the Cabinet Manual integrity prescription and integrity guidance issued by the Office of the Auditor General, both of which address a wider audience than the State Services.  This could be considered a matter of insignificance because the Cabinet Manual incorporates the language of the Commissioner’s standards. What is probable is that it is just a language slip with SSC not using the precision expected when the owner of the machinery of government refers to State sector and State Services.

Cabinet Manual prescription, under the Principles of public service  (lower case p and s) is that “…Employees in the state sector must act with a spirit of service to the community and meet high standards of integrity and conduct in everything they do. In particular, employees must be fair, impartial, responsible, and trustworthy….”

www.ssc.govt.nz/senior-leader-development#related-resources

www.ssc.govt.nz/sites/all/files/ssrpf-pre-introduction-briefing.pdf

www.ssc.govt.nz/leadership-success-profile

http://cabinetmanual.cabinetoffice.govt.nz/3.50