Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People

5. Incentives and Accountability for Scaling Up

138 5 Incentives and Accountability for Scaling Up johannes f. linn The scaling up of successful development interventions involves an iterative cycle of innovation, knowledge management, and expansion or replication .1 Experience shows that successful scaling up requires driving forces (drivers ) that push the process forward and the creation of spaces—or the removal of obstacles—so that successful innovative initiatives can be expanded and replicated .2 Among the drivers of scaling are the innovative idea or model, leaders and champions who have a clear vision of scale to be achieved, external events or influences (economic crisis, external aid), and incentives and accountability for the actors involved. A 2008 study considers incentives (and accountability) a particularly important driver for the scaling-up process and explores it briefly in its review of the literature and experience with scaling up.3 The German aid agency GIZ (formerly GTZ) in its guidelines for scaling up also addresses incentives as an important factor facilitating scaling up, including financial incentives (such as subsidies), competitions, transparency, and peer-to-peer learning.4 An exemplary case study of the scaling-up experience of the Mexican national conditional cash-transfer program, Progresa-Oportunidades, stresses the importance 1. Linn and others (2010). 2. Hartmann and Linn (2008). 3. Hartmann and Linn (2008). 4. GTZ (2010). Incentives and Accountability for Scaling Up 139 of appropriate incentives and accountabilities in explaining the scaling-up success of this program.5 A recent institutional scaling-up review carried out by a Brookings team for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) systematically looks at how IFAD’s operational incentive and accountability mechanisms (its operational strategy, policies, processes, and instruments , as well as its budgetary practices and management practices) support the scaling up of successful interventions.6 Another 2010 study explores options for providing incentives for scaling up successful interventions in fragile states by modifying donors’ country-allocation rules for aid.7 Beyond these few sources, I find no systematic consideration of incentives as a driver in the scaling-up literature, although incentives are mentioned in passing in various documents dealing with the scaling-up challenge, and useful evidence can be gleaned here and there. For example, in developing its comprehensive framework for scaling up, one study mentions the need for incentives in connection with managing implementation and coordination.8 The World Bank, in its report on the major conference it organized with the Chinese authorities in 2004 in Shanghai on scaling up poverty reduction, summarizes the example of China ’s successful strategy for scaling up, which allows insights into the incentives provided by the Chinese approach.9 The World Bank’s exploration of scaling up in agriculture and rural development mentions the role of “financial incentives of donors and governments” for supporting scaling up.10 And the World Bank’s report that calls for large-scale action on nutrition notes that incentives are needed for implementers, including performance monitoring and linking aid disbursement to performance.11 The official review by the UK government, “Scaling Up Innovation in the Public Sector,” repeatedly notes the importance of “rewards, incentives and recognition” for effective scaling up by the public sector.12 All these documents have one thing in common: while postulating that incentives and accountability are important for scaling up, none of them provide any detailed analysis of or guidance on what incentives are needed by whom, for whom, and when, what incentives actually work, why, and how, and so on. The purpose of this chapter is to begin to fill this gap with a special focus on what innovative approaches and tools are available and should be further explored to support the scaling-up process in development. 5. Levy (2006). 6. Linn and others (2010). 7. Gelb (2010). 8. Cooley and Kohl (2005). 9. Wang (2005). 10. World Bank (2003b, p. 42). 11. World Bank (2006). 12. H.M. Civil Service (2011). 140 Johannes F. Linn In doing so, the chapter draws on a related strand of literature regarding effective service provision and sustainability of aid. The World Bank, in its report on public service delivery, provides a useful analytical framework for considering incentives and accountability in public service provision, although it does not specifically focus on the scaling-up challenge.13 An earlier study considers incentives in an in-depth review carried out for the Swedish aid agency SIDA, with a view to how incentives support sustainability, which is closely related to...