The Political Economy of Public Procurement Reform is a ten-paged document published by the Anti-Corruption Resource Center or U4 Helpdesk of the Transparency International (mchene@transparency.org) and published last June 16, 2009. The paper looked at Political Economy in relation to Procurement Reform and Capacity Building from a developing country perspective.It feeds into and improve the Capacity Development and Reform work of DAC Procurement Task Force. The study uncovers existing studies around procurement and support the development of a proposal for a joint study. The study has three parts: Applying Political Economy Analysis to Procurement Reform, Existing Studies on the Political Economy of Procurement Reform, and Further Readings.
The OECD refers to political economy analysis as “being concerned with the interaction of political and economic processes in a society: the distribution of power and wealth between different individuals and groups; and the process that create, sustain and transform these relationships overtime”.This study emphasises the importance of grounding public sector reforms in a country’s political reality and identifies key drivers of successful Public Finance Management reforms that can be directly applied to procurement reforms, including factors such as country-led strategies, country owned management of reform process, co-ordinated donor support, stakeholder engagement and capacity development.
As procurement reform has been traditionally seen as a technical and administrative process, there are very few studies focusing on its political economy dimension. With regard to procurement, political economy issues have been implicitly addressed as part of studies looking at public sector or governance reform more broadly. Yet, as procurement reform often meets major resistance from vested interests within society there is a growing recognition of the need to understand and address the underlying factors that may undermine political will for reform and more systematically analyse the effects of political incentives on the feasibility and sustainability of such reforms.
