The UNDP has issued the “Guidance Note: Institutional Context Analysis for the Sustainable Development Goals” that follows the common approach to supporting the 2030 Agenda on “Mainstreaming, Acceleration and Policy Support” (MAPS), developed by the United Nations Development Group.
The Institutional and Context Analysis (ICA) assumes that the implementation of a given policy succeeds when key players have an incentive to make it succeed. Therefore, the institutional and context analysis is the key for understanding the successes and the failures of the policy implementation.
For instance, an ICA in Papua New Guinea sought to understand how can revenues from extractive industries be translated into human development outcomes? In this case, the ICA revealed that while the national budget allocated plenty of resources to health and education, most of the funds failed to reach their intended destinations for
reasons related to lack of capacity, transparency and accountability, and there was little incentive on the part of key decision makers at national and local levels to change the state of affairs because would mean undermining their own influence.
In order to support the MAPS approach, the term ‘institutional and context analysis’ refers to an “analysis that focuses on political, economic and institutional factors in a given country and how these may have a positive or negative impact on the implementation of policy priorities for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.”
In measuring inequality, not only should we look at the various (yet still limited) economics views (inequality of revenues, inequalities of spending or life cycle inequalities based on permanent incomes); but also go beyond and look at “multidimensional inequality”.
