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Developed by GTZ, the Governance Questionnaire (GQ) is used to
analyse the political and institutional framework of a country,
including the actors and processes within a government.
The GQ asks qualified respondents for a personal assessment of
the political context in their country. The questions cover six
dimensions:
- Relationship between state and society
- Political systems
- Political culture, change agents and development concepts
- Politics and gender
- Economic policy and the political framework of markets
- International integration
Further details about the tool
The GQ enables development practitioners and decision makers to
systematically analyse and visualise the political and institutional
framework of a country, as well as the actors and processes of a
governance system. Applied in its entirety, the GQ can be used to
situate policy in its wider political and institutional context.
It can help to analyse the performance of and the relationships
within the political system as well as between the state and civil
society. Thus, the GQ can give commissioners and facilitators of
PSIA indications about actors and processes that need to be considered
when designing the PSIA consultation process and its feedback into
decision-making. Practitioners can select specific questions and
adapt them to assess the political economy context of specific reforms.
The GQ can help to identify entry points for further institutional
and stakeholder analysis.
The GQ's potential rests on its three central characteristics:
- It goes beyond the survey of formal institutions to also include
informal ones such as values, norms, attitudes and customs.
- Its multidisciplinary approach brings together the perspectives
of political science, law, economics, legal anthropology and empirical
social research.
- The introduction of political arenas facilitates a look at
complex social structures without losing track of important interrelations.
If required, the GQ can also be used for a quantitative analysis
with the aid of statistical software. It has been designed to be
used to support The World Bank's Think Tools. The GQ is based on
a questionnaire that can be used to ask qualified respondents for
a personal assessment of the political reality in their society.
The respondents can provide reasons for their answers at the end
of each question. These additional explanations can provide a detailed
picture of a specific situation and can be used for a more in-depth
analysis. The questions cover six political arenas as outlined above.
For a qualitative analysis, written or oral interviews with at least
15 qualified respondents from different professional groups and
social backgrounds should be carried out - using the option of specifying
the reasons for the answers. For a quantitative analysis, written
interviews with at least 10 qualified respondents per political
arena should be held. The results can be then visualised using software,
thus providing an immediate overview of where the main problems
lay, and permitting a comparison between countries or vis-à-vis
benchmarks.
The timescale for using this tool is two to three months and training
in empirical social research as well as a background in political
sciences / political economy, sociology are helpful. Local knowledge
and overview of the main actors at play in a country are essential.
The tool's systemic approach to governance gives a first picture
of trends and blockages, however further in-depth analysis of the
state of specific policy reforms is thus needed. Another limitiation
is that the inclusion of informal institutions leaves out some topics
that belong to the classical public management discourse.
For more information
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