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Lesson
Policy actions must be formulated in a manner that does not leave room for ambiguity or interpretation of supported policy principles. A large number of policy actions under PSDP were not sufficiently defined to ensure or help ascertain the achievement of meaningful results.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Public enterprise reform in the FSM requires creative approaches to involving the private sector in the management of public assets given limited private sector capacity and interest. The effort to reform and divest public enterprises has not been as successful as hoped. One reason is that in such a small and remote lower-income country with a weak private sector, there are few people with the capital or business experience to bid for or successfully manage such enterprises.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Ascertaining legislative support at both the national and state levels is an important aspect of determining project readiness in the FSM. The unexpected delays in obtaining national and state legislative authorization delayed the loan approval and loan effectiveness, each by 1 year, respectively. Reform momentum was lost during the long interval between appraisal and program inception.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
IT-related project components need extra attention from ADB in small, remote countries with low capacity. From the start, the IT components for the land management administrations and FSMDB were not properly scoped and resourced. They did not adequately consider the limited capacity of internal IT departments and local IT providers. They also failed to address such related problems as the need to provide implementation support throughout the first year of operation.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Program implementation arrangements in the FSM need to recognize the limited authority of a program implementation unit at the national level over state administrations.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Consider targeting support for reform initiatives in the FSM at individual states. Decentralized practices among the four states (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap) make coordination and communication on policy issues a challenge. This challenge was compounded by the weak capacity of various implementing agencies and different views and levels of political commitment regarding the reform agenda. These resulted in varying degrees of performance.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
A design and monitoring framework can be an effective instrument to attain results only if it is properly shared with implementing agencies and provides clear performance targets with appropriate timelines, monitoring mechanisms, and baseline data. Sufficient resources and time should have been allocated for consultation with implementing agencies in determining program inputs, outputs, and outcomes, as well as in setting and monitoring performance targets.

Project Number: 33314-013
Project Name: Federated States of Micronesia: Private Sector Development Program
Report Date:
Lesson
In view of capacity limitation on the part of the government, closer and more intensive handholding would have been indicated, such that deploying in-house medium-to-long-term experts would have been advisable.

Project Number: 35376-013
Project Name: Second Phase of the Governance Reform Program
Report Date:
Lesson
For complex, complicated, and broad-based programs such as this program, close monitoring is a must, such that greater responsibility can wholly or partly be devolved to the resident mission, with appropriate in-house expertise.

Project Number: 35376-013
Project Name: Second Phase of the Governance Reform Program
Report Date:
Lesson
The Managing Government Expenditure prescription on public financial management would be appropriate: (i) never transpose into a different social and economic context reforms introduced elsewhere, without in-depth assessment of their impact and requirements and appropriate adaptation if necessary; (ii) never move beyond the basics until one is certain that the basics have been set right; (iii) never hope for a quick-and-easy technical solution to complex and longstanding budget process problems; and above all, (iv) keep the local authorities firmly in charge of the reform process, and never

Project Number: 35376-013
Project Name: Second Phase of the Governance Reform Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Most of the benefits associated with the reforms supported under the cluster program were conditional on the final reforms to be supported under a subprogram 3, which never eventuated. To the extent that this caused reform momentum to be lost or take a risky direction, this approach risked delaying (at a minimum) or wasting years of reform effort (TA, financial resources and government commitment).

Project Number: 41545-013, 41545-023
Project Name: Sindh Growth and Rural Revitalization Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Reform agendas chosen for program cluster support should be carefully selected during program design. Subprogram 1 had 25 policy conditions, while subprogram 2 had 38 policy conditions. The large number of implementing agencies and reform areas complicates program coordination. When reviewing the implementation of this cluster program, too often it seemed that quantity of policy actions was a substitute for the low number of consequent reforms that could be achieved within the indicative time-span.

Project Number: 41545-013, 41545-023
Project Name: Sindh Growth and Rural Revitalization Program
Report Date:
Lesson
The importance of reform momentum and of programmatic assistance for sustaining the momentum. However, the experience with some reforms in core policy areas 1 and 3 is a reminder that when sufficient political pressure is exerted, financial and technical capacity constraints can sometimes be overcome, even in the absence of programmatic support (as would have been provided through subprogram 3). This calls for greater effort during the design and implementation stages to assess the political and economic context, which can determine whether or not a reform effort will succeed.

Project Number: 41545-013, 41545-023
Project Name: Sindh Growth and Rural Revitalization Program
Report Date:
Lesson
Policy dialogue required on-the-ground support from ADB. Establishment of the ADB development coordination office in November 2011 played a key role in forging policy dialogue, although this was undertaken issue-by-issue (expenditure management, taxation, and state-owned enterprise reform) rather than through a holistic approach. Other development partners also provided substantial support for public sector reform in the Republic of Marshall Islands, but the coordinated dialogue with government that has been used successfully in programs elsewhere in the Pacific was missing.

Project Number: 43321-013, 43321-023
Project Name: Public Sector Program - Subprograms 1 and 2: Program Completion Report
Report Date:
Lesson
All Pacific developing member countries, including the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI), have great difficulty implementing policies to support long-term adjustments. The program included several line expenditure conditions under output 2 that the government struggled to implement and monitor (para. 16). In the end, the government decided to make across-the-board expenditure cuts rather than the targeted cuts proposed under the program. The condition targets were related to budget estimates rather than budget outturns.

Project Number: 43321-013, 43321-023
Project Name: Public Sector Program - Subprograms 1 and 2: Program Completion Report
Report Date: