Evaluating Governance Reform using a Case-Control Approach
Summary
Nepal adopted a new constitution in 2015 intended to transform the governance system from a centralized unitary state to a federal one. A key objective of this reform is to ensure economic equality and social justice for all Nepalese. Key actors in this reform are 753 Local Government units across 7 provinces. UKAID, the development aid branch of the U.K. Government, is implementing an ambitious local government strengthening and support programme to help the country transition to a federal state. This project will evaluate the success of the local government strengthening programme using an innovative case control approach that is typically used in the biomedical sciences in cases where a randomized control trial is not feasible or ethical. In this case, some local government units (LG) may take advantage of the capacity strengthening and other services provided through the UKAID intervention and others will not. At the end of the three-year study period, we will collect governance and citizen well-being outcomes in 90 LG units, and identify units that improved over the period. These will be the cases. These will be matched to similar LGs without improvements in outcomesthe controls. We will then estimate whether the rate of take-up of services in the cases is higher than in the controls.