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1. The redundancy is evident in the same lessons learned constantly appearing as new discoveries— for example, the need to coordinate activities or the fact that institutional reform is slow and that new technologies or new laws require complementary actions to ensure their impact. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of this undertaking, progress is best described as incipient, disjointed, and overly redundant.1 This chapter offers some practical recommendations for accelerating the process, focusing on how reform participants can improve the information used and generated by their individual activities and convert it into a common knowledge base accessible to and utilized by all players. Four key elements in that effort are assessments, monitoring , evaluation, and research. Though discussed separately, they are interrelated and ideally should build on each other. The emphasis on Weld interventions might seem illogical given practitioners’ bias toward action as opposed to reXection. This, however, is where most information originates and where its inadequate utilization poses the greatest costs. In the absence of a strong academic constituency with a vested interest in the discipline’s development, the practitioners, for better or worse, still have the major responsibility. This is in the nature of a lessons-learned analysis. The negative lessons have already been addressed and are not repeated here. They do suggest that the task will not be easy. At the risk of placing excessive faith in the powers of rationality, my assumption is that an analysis of what we know about how we generate, collect, and use information can encourage improvements even in the face of organizational and political incentives for doing otherwise. There is a corollary assumption —the belief that knowledge-based action produces better results than stabs in the dark or uninformed good intentions. This still begs the question of how much you should know before you act and how much time and other resources should be invested in sheer knowledge building as opposed to working actual improvements. An emphasis on immediate action is embedded in most reformers’ incentive systems , as demonstrated by their frequent argument that we have enough studies and that what we have has not been useful (or used). Although more resources should be devoted to constructing a knowledge base, I agree that we have made poor use of what we have. More with more would be better. For the present, more with the existing investment is a desirable and feasible goal. SEVEN improving the knowledge base for judicial reform programs The further development of these arguments is very simple. It reviews how the four activities have been conducted, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the usual approaches and deriving some lessons as to how they could be improved. Not discussed, but of equal importance, are the subsequent steps required to disseminate the improved knowledge base and encourage its use by the reform community . It can be hoped that the availability of a better product will provide additional incentives and that those involved in its creation will promote its use. Realistically, more direct action will also be needed and more thought devoted to the form it should take. assessments: their place in reform programs If only as a matter of faith, it is generally agreed that any reform program requires a good prior understanding of the problem to be resolved. This is usually achieved through a diagnostic, assessment, or appraisal.2 Whatever the term used, the intended product is a presumably objective study identifying the problems of the target system, attempting to prioritize and relate them, analyzing immediate and underlying causes, and suggesting likely solutions. In schematic terms, this means gathering the information needed to Wll out the two pyramids introduced in the previous chapter. It is also generally agreed that the assessment should be as broadly focused and open-ended as possible even though its recommendations will likely target only a part of the system. This is a way of avoiding the risk of premature diagnosis —the study focuses on what the authors have already decided is the problem and thus overlooks what may be more important issues. Diagnosis is an iterative undertaking and will inevitably incorporate some preexisting notion of what is wrong. A good diagnostic takes this notion as a hypothesis and is prepared to test and replace it as necessary. Finally, an assessment often requires original Weldwork and data gathering, but it can also be done as a desk study, especially in systems where considerable information and research are already available. Despite the simplicity of...

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