94 SOCIAL CONTRACTS FOR DEVELOPMENT
BOX 6.1
Application of the Social Contract Framing in Haiti and Somalia Given the challenges of working with government at the central level in Haiti, an Advisory Services and Analytics effort was launched to look at the entry points for working at the subnational levels of government. A social contract framing was used to organize the analytical work. The rationale was that such a framing incorporates the double-sided nature of local governance: (1) an examination of the capability of public institutions necessary for service provision, including law and order, at the local level; and (2) an understanding of the degree to which citizens associate with authority and power. Such a framing is important in a context, such as Haiti, with weak state institutions for two reasons: first, to test sustainability and, over time, motivate citizens to pay taxes in return for service provision (Moore, Prichard, and Fjeldstad 2018); and second, to explore ways in which to strengthen basic trust in local authority, resulting in greater public safety and stability (McCullough 2020). Building on this regional study, a World Bank team drafted the report “Understanding Somalia’s Social Contract and State-Building Efforts: Consequences for Donor Interventions” (Cloutier et al., forthcoming). The paper investigates the country development challenges through the three social contract compasses of citizen-state bargaining, outcomes, and resilience. It uses the mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology to analyze the relative strengths and weaknesses of social contracts at different scales regarding security, taxation, and education.
Analysis to Understand Chronic Policy Failure and Identify Opportunities for Reform The technical policy solutions being offered for chronic development challenges in Africa are relatively well known; the challenge is in their adoption and effective implementation. In this sense, a social contract lens is a means of applying the conceptual framework of the World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law (World Bank 2017) to identify underlying constraints to policy effectiveness. IEG (2019, 15) concludes that “well-executed social contract diagnostics help teams understand policy failures, local political dynamics, and intractable development challenges and contribute to building partnerships.” A number of Systematic Country Diagnostics in Africa1 have referred to the need to strengthen the social contract as a means of reversing negative pathologies, but with an inconsistent, and often thin, analytical basis to explain what that really means and what is possible.
