ODE BRIEFS
December 2012
Organisational Capacity Building
Evaluation of Australian Law and Justice Assistance
RAMSI adviser, Chris Cooper, and former Solomon Islands Assistance Police Commissioner, Eddie Sijua, lead a session during one of RAMSI’s
Making a Difference capacity development workshops in 2010. Photo: Courtesy of RAMSI.
Key points
 Building on Local Strengths, a major thematic evaluation of Australian law and justice assistance, challenges
the relevance and effectiveness of organisational capacity building as the dominant approach to
programming.
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The organisational capacity-building approach seeks to address weaknesses in the organisations that deliver
services, rather than build on existing strengths.
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Focusing on organisational capacity may not lead to improvements in the lives of citizens because a range of
factors mediate the relationship between justice provider and citizen.
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Australia should balance the organisational capacity-building approach with other programming
approaches—such as service delivery, problem-solving and thematic—in order to promote more tangible
improvements in the delivery of law and justice.
This ODE Brief provides a snapshot of the findings on organisational capacity building in Building on Local
Strengths: Evaluation of Australian law and justice assistance. The evaluation considered the relevance and
effectiveness of Australia’s law and justice assistance delivered by all Australian Government agencies, with
three country case studies conducted: Cambodia, Indonesia and Solomon Islands. Assessing why capacitybuilding efforts often yield disappointing results was a major theme of the evaluation.
‘Organisational capacity building’ is the dominant approach to Australian law and justice assistance. The Building on
Local Strengths evaluation found that Australian overseas development assistance has been able to build pockets of
capacity in particular aspects of the administration of justice—for example, the efficiency with which a court system
handles its case load—but that the overall quality of justice services do not necessarily improve as a result.
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Australia has emerged as one of the largest players in international law and justice assistance. Its law and justice
portfolio of A$370 million in 2010–11 represented nearly 15 per cent of the bilateral aid program. Major AusAID
programs support judicial and corrections systems in Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Vanuatu and a number of other countries.
Organisational capacity building
The organisational capacity-building approach to aid programming assumes that with better training, rules,
regulations, processes, procedures, managerial systems, infrastructure, budgets, etc., law and justice institutions will
be better able to deliver the public services they are meant to provide. However, lack of capacity is usually only one of
a range of factors constraining the delivery of justice. Therefore, capacity building is not guaranteed to produce
tangible results for citizens. Furthermore, most of the measurement indicators tend to be outputs rather than
outcomes/results because the principal beneficiary of this approach is the organisation.
Australia’s assistance in this sector is distinguished by its strong whole-of-government approach. Over the past decade
the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has invested in building a standing capacity for policing assistance through its
International Deployment Group, whose support for the Regional Assistance Mission in Solomon Islands (RAMSI)
has averaged A$115 million per year over the past four years. The Attorney-General’s Department and a number of
other Australian Government agencies are also directly involved in the delivery of law and justice assistance.
Law and justice assistance from OECD countries has more than quadrupled in recent years, but among law and justice
practitioners there is a widespread crisis of confidence about what it is able to achieve. Theories on the role of legal
systems in the development process have changed significantly over the years—from promoting more efficient
markets, to empowering poor communities to fight for social justice, to helping fragile states build their legitimacy.
Empirically, however, little is known about the causal linkages between more effective justice institutions and the
achievement of broader development goals. Furthermore, it is difficult to demonstrate that law and justice assistance
has led to improvements in the quality of justice delivered to citizens.
The limited record of traditional capacity-building support
At the activity level, the evaluation found many examples of effective approaches to law and justice assistance. In
general, Australian law and justice assistance is flexible, responsive and willing to innovate. Australian support is
usually highly regarded by counterparts and peers, and strong relationships have been built up with counterparts.
Good relationships and flexible funding modalities help Australia to operate in complex political environments and
respond to reform opportunities as they arise.
Looking across the law and justice portfolio, results are apparent in a number of areas. There have been improvements
in the administration of justice, through improved case management and registry processes. Some improvements in
legal aid services, particularly for women and juveniles, are helping to expedite justice for remandees. Prisoner
welfare has improved as a result of investments in prison infrastructure. In Cambodia in particular, some small-scale
but well-chosen capital investments in partner prisons, such as improving security fences to enable prisoners to spend
more time outside of their cells, have led to significant and lasting improvements in prison conditions.
However, despite impressive achievements in particular areas, there is frustration about the extent and pace of
achievement of Australian law and justice assistance. The core of the Australian approach has involved investments in
capacity building in central justice institutions: ministries of justice and interior, courts, police forces and correction
systems. Ambitious attempts to tackle major organisational deficiencies in these institutions appear unable to secure
lasting improvements in the quality of law and justice services.
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Innovative elements of Australian law and justice assistance to Indonesia
Australia supported exchanges between Indonesia’s justice institutions and its strong community of legal NGOs, by
funding a Judicial Reform Team staffed by NGO experts within the Supreme Court and Attorney-General’s Office.
As well as increasing the policy capacity of the counterpart institutions, this helped NGOs gain a detailed
understanding of the reform challenges, improving their advocacy capacity.
With the support of AusAID, a twinning relationship between the Federal and Family Courts of Australia and the
Indonesian Supreme Court has developed over the past seven years, increasing Australia’s level of access and policy
influence. Australian judges and court officials regard their Indonesian counterparts as peers, which allows them to
provide advice in sensitive areas that would normally be closed to contracted experts.
Australia has supported Indonesia’s policy of promoting transparency within the judicial system as a means of
increasing accountability and tackling corruption. Judgments of the Supreme Court and High Religious Courts are
now published online, for the first time allowing legal NGOs and academics to debate their merits and giving the
President of the Court greater oversight of judicial productivity. Publication of court procedures and fee rates has also
helped to reduce petty corruption.
How does Australia go about promoting institutional change?
Law and justice institutions are part of the fabric of any society, embedded within political and economic structures.
Like all social institutions, they continually evolve and adapt. Relatively little is known about which factors bring
about improvements in law and justice institutions and how external interventions can help promote change.
The evaluation found that the weakest aspect of Australian law and justice programs was often the ‘theory of
change’—that is, the logical link between activities and the changes they hope to bring about. Australian programs
have tended to approach shortcomings in law and justice systems by focusing on capacity constraints in specific
organisations, and applying a fairly standard set of capacity-building activities. These include the training of staff, the
provision of infrastructure and equipment, and the introduction of new management systems and practices. The
underlying assumption of this approach is that poor performance of justice institutions is caused by internal capacity
constraints, and therefore able to be solved through technical fixes. This assumption is by no means unique to
Australia; it reflects the orthodox approach to institutional development among OECD donors.
The evaluation found that there are clear limits to how much institutional change can be delivered through the topdown organisational capacity-building approach, for a number of reasons. These are discussed below.
The politics of institutional change
A shortage of capacity is not always the binding constraint on institutional performance. In all three case study
countries, a dense network of informal institutions overlays the formal justice system. These informal institutions
often create the incentives that drive poor-quality justice services. Therefore, in practice, the relationship between
justice provider and recipient is mediated by a host of other phenomena, including power relations and economic
interests.
AFP’s Deployment Group
Research by staff at the AFP’s International Deployment Group demonstrates the strong association between the rule
of law and levels of human development outcomes around the world. Improvements in law and justice institutions
without corresponding improvements in human development result in ‘push-back’ from elite vested interests and a
regression to the previous status quo.
Murney, Tony, Sue-Ellen Crawford & Andie Hider, 2011, “Transnational Policing and International Human Development – A Rule of Law
Perspective”, Journal of International Peacekeeping, 15:1–2, 39–71
For example, in Cambodia, Australia has been providing a fairly standard package of capacity-building support to the
ministries of Justice and Interior, the police, the judiciary and the corrections system. This has included support for
strategic planning, budgeting, executive training, human resource management and gender mainstreaming. In most
cases (with the exception of the corrections component), this support failed to achieve enough traction to make any
appreciable difference to organisational performance. The evaluation found that many of the goals of the assistance,
such as promoting an independent judiciary, worked against the logic of the Cambodian political system. There was
evidence that the Ministry of Justice, in particular, had been kept deliberately weak in order to minimise its influence
over the courts, frustrating attempts at capacity building. Corruption was another major constraint. The justice sector
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is overlaid by highly developed systems for extracting rents that work against reform. In this environment, a capacitybuilding approach risks treating the symptoms, rather than the cause.
The evaluation concludes that strengthening the rule of law in developing countries must come about through
processes of political contestation and negotiation. Where some common ground has emerged on the principles,
purpose and functions of law and justice institutions, international support may be able to help with putting those
institutions in place. Where there is no consensus, international assistance may more usefully focus on supporting the
underlying mechanisms of change (e.g. processes of representation, consultation, networking and information flows),
and the organisations through which different social interests are expressed (e.g. business associations, trade unions
and NGOs). In practice, this means that Australian law and justice assistance often needs to be more limited and
realistic in its goals.
Over-ambitious reforms
A second reason for the limited impact of top-down capacity building is that it promotes reform processes that are too
ambitious for the counterparts to absorb. Capacity-building programs typically begin with a needs assessment
identifying organisational shortcomings, from which a comprehensive package of reforms is developed. In low-capacity
environments, the list of shortcomings is likely to be very long. As a rule, the weaker an organisation is, the lower its
capacity to manage change. A capacity-building approach that tackles too many fundamental issues at once is therefore
unlikely to succeed.
Comprehensive reform initiatives depend upon sophisticated planning, budgeting and management functions that are
often not present at the outset. The focus of assistance therefore shifts to building these central capacities. If this is itself
a long-term endeavour, as often proves to be the case, there is a real danger that assistance will end up concentrating on
central functions at the expense of service delivery. At its worst, this approach treats law and justice agencies, rather
than the public, as though they were the intended beneficiary.
The root of the problem with this approach to programming is that it focuses on organisational weaknesses, rather than
building on existing strengths. By contrast, an approach that starts with an existing set of functions and capabilities and
aims for incremental improvement is more likely to deliver tangible results.
The dangers of institutional templates
Finally, there is a danger that organisational capacity building encourages the promotion of institutional templates.
Needs assessments are usually based on some idea of organisational best practice—particularly in the law and justice
field, where Australian lawyers, police and corrections officers bring with them strong normative standards based on
their own training and experience. As one AFP adviser put it, there is a tendency to treat police forces in developing
countries as “broken versions” of our own.
This can lead to a bias towards capital-intensive solutions—such as the introduction of expensive vehicles into police
practices in Solomon Islands—and building sophisticated capacities at the expense of supporting adaptations and
compromises that work in the local environment. The evaluation stresses the importance of adopting objectives that
are appropriate and achievable in the country context.
New ways of thinking about capacity building
What can Australian law and justice assistance do to avoid these pitfalls?
To help capture what differentiates the more successful elements of Australian assistance, the evaluation sets out three
alternative ways of thinking about law and justice programming.
1.
2.
3.
The service-delivery approach starts from the point of delivery of justice services and works towards
incremental improvements in the coverage and quality of those services. This builds on existing strengths and
capacities, while targeting service delivery outcomes that are directly relevant to the intended beneficiaries.
The problem-solving approach takes known challenges around the delivery of justice as its starting point,
and applies a problem-solving approach to resolving them. It seeks to identify pragmatic solutions and then
institutionalise the results. For organisations without strong planning, budgeting and management capacity,
problem solving may be a more realistic approach to organisational change than top-down capacity building.
In addition, working to resolve problems that span the justice system—for example, reducing prison
overcrowding—can help to introduce collaboration across a fragmented justice sector.
The thematic approach takes the justice system as one entry point in a broader strategy for addressing a
social issue. Examples might include natural resource management, urbanisation or violence against women.
While these issues have important legal dimensions, a credible approach must involve action on several
fronts, working with a range of government agencies and non-government actors. An advantage of the
thematic approach is that it can help to introduce partner countries to the possibilities of using the legal
system as a tool of social policy.
These are not intended to be self-contained models for project design, but different ways of thinking about how to
support institutional change. The evaluation concludes that Australian assistance is at its best when it combines these
approaches strategically, together with traditional organisational capacity building.
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Effective approaches
The evaluation found that examples of more effective approaches to promoting institutional change across the
Australian law and justice portfolio used different entry points and change processes by:
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taking existing capacities and functions and working towards incremental improvement, rather than
comprehensive reform
promoting flexible, adaptive, ‘good enough’ solutions, rather than imported institutional templates
using modes of change that did not presuppose sophisticated policy-making, planning or budgeting capacity
focusing on problems or issues where there were existing constituencies for change, who could be mobilised
and supported
working directly at the point of interaction between law and justice institutions and citizens, to deliver
immediate and measurable results.
Full report
The full evaluation report and management response, three detailed case studies, and an ODE Brief summarising key
findings can be found at www.ode.ausaid.gov.au
Office of Development Effectiveness
AusAID’s Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) monitors the performance of the Australian aid program,
evaluates its impact and contributes to international evidence and debate about aid and development effectiveness.
ODE Briefs are short, focused pieces of research and analysis on key findings and emerging themes on aid
effectiveness.
ode@ausaid.gov.au
www.ode.ausaid.gov.au
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