Job: Extended Term Consultant

Location: Washington, DC 
Deadline: Monday, 14 October 2013 

Description

Background / General description:

How governments are structured, how they manage money and people matters crucially for the quality of services they can provide to their citizen. When say health services perform poorly, the underlying constraints can often be found deeper inside the machinery of government. For example, health centers may lack medication for many reasons - simply because it gets stolen, because infrastructure is poor or distribution channels ineffective, because information systems are dysfunctional or central and local governments do not co-ordinate well, because of cumbersome or corrupt procurement processes, or because the Ministry of Finance does not release cash in time for the Ministry of Health to buy drugs. Diagnosing where the shoe pinches most and why is often not straightforward - but crucial for focusing World Bank supported public sector reform efforts on where they can make the most difference.

As a key part of its Public Sector Management Approach for 2011 to 2020, the World Bank's Public Sector Group is piloting a new diagnostic approach for preparing public sector projects. The diagnostic approach seeks to identify 'binding constraints' to public sector performance problems by combining two main ideas. First, in the style of Ricardo Hausmann et al.'s (2008) growth diagnostics framework, it relies on a set of principles of 'differential diagnostics' and on available (administrative and other) data for plausibly discriminating between different potential root causes of a public sector performance problem. Second, it takes the engagement process with key reform stakeholders very seriously - recognizing that problem- and solution-formulation are not whiteboard exercises, but inherently political processes of negotiation and priority-setting that are crucial for broad reform ownership.

Between October 2013 and October 2014, the Bank's Public Sector Group will pilot such diagnostics in at least five public sector operations under preparation in selected countries. The diagnostics will be prepared in joint missions with project preparation teams and directly feed into the respective project designs. The diagnostic analysis will also be published to document innovative ways of using and interpreting data for diagnostic purposes that can be useful to other project teams.

In this context, the Bank's Public Sector and Governance Unit (PRMPS) is looking to recruit a full-time Extended Term Consultant (ETC, for 1 year) who will work jointly with project teams to plan and conduct (some of) the diagnostics. The starting date for the ETC will be mid-October or early November 2013.

In addition, the PRMPS team is putting together a pool of motivated and skilled Short-Term Consultants (STC) who could conduct or contribute to individual diagnostics on shorter contracts (about 40 days). In case applicants would be interested in such STC diagnostic assignments (about 40-50 days), please indicate this in the application (ETC, STC with availability dates or both). Please also indicate your availability between October and April 2014, as the exact timing of the assignments will depend on individual project preparation schedules.

Duties and Accountabilities:

The ETC will have both management and analytical responsibilities. Management:

• Co-ordinating the planning of pilot diagnostics with project teams, country offices and the client government;
• Organizing regular brainstorming meetings between the five diagnostic teams to share ideas on diagnostic methods and provide 'life'-support to the diagnostic teams;
• Liaising with an 'Advisory Group' of senior Bank technical experts who support the diagnostic teams;
• Running the day-to-day operations of a trust fund; 
  Analytical tasks will comprise:
• Conducting 2-3 pilot diagnostics independently, in close co-ordination with a project preparation team. This will comprise participation in project preparation missions, conducting interviews & focus groups with government counterparts and other stakeholders, developing analytical frameworks and data collection strategies, conducting and writing up the diagnostic analysis and closely working with the project team to feed findings into project designs;
• Based on the findings / challenges confronted in the pilot diagnostics, co-author a 'doing public sector diagnostics' paper that summarizes data collection and analytical strategies that have proven successful in the five pilot diagnostics; 
  The ETCs task will focus on conducting one or two pilot diagnostics.

Selection Criteria:

Overall, this assignment seeks to push the frontier of how the Bank conducts public sector diagnostics. It will require creativity, a strong ability to independently conduct high quality and innovative field research on public sector management issues in developing countries, often under tight data and time constraints. It will also require the ability to engage credibly with client government counterparts and to work as a project preparation team member in a high pressure environment.

A strong candidate should have:

• A PhD or Master's Degree in Economics, Public Policy / Administration or related Social Sciences;
• Strong qualitative and quantitative research skills and prior experience in independently designing and conducting field research in developing countries;
• Three to eight years of experience of working on public management reform issues, ideally both from a sectoral (e.g. education / health / infrastructure) and from a center-of-government perspective (civil service systems, public financial management systems, management across levels of government);
• Management Consulting experience could also be a suitable background;
• Experience in engaging in policy dialogue with government counterparts on sensitive reform issues;
• Strong self-management and team-work ability, high degree of independence;
• Perfect fluency in written English and ability to produce high-quality analytical work with minimal oversight (French or Spanish might be useful);

More Info and Application