Political salience and effectiveness of means of implementation

Our study sought to assess the level of authority associated with each policy and interrogated evidence of other mechanisms to support implementation—i.e. the extent to which policies are explicit on systems of accountability, and the presence of an identified budgetary line item.

Not every policy document is of equal stature: a document that has been subject to national consultation, gone through a parliamentary committee and adopted by two houses of parliament has greater authority than a document drafted without inclusive processes and rubber-stamped by a ministerial technical committee. Authority is defined as having the legitimacy to influence, induce and/or enforce compliance and is largely related to the status of the government body issuing the policy (Klein and Marmor, 2006). Hence, we categorized relevant documents in relation to their relative ‘authoritativeness’—indicating the likelihood that bureaucrats, industry and society would act on them (Howlett, 2019). A country-focused hierarchy of the authoritativeness of policy documents was determined by each national team with the authority of each policy categorized as high, middle or low (see Table 1).

Hierarchy of policy authority in each country

Constitution

Act

Laws

Regulation (with presidential approval)

Afghanistan national peace and development framework

Constitution

Act

Laws (legislation/ statue)

Constitution

Act

Laws/case law

Constitution

Act (legislation/ statue)

Constitution

International treaties

Laws

Constitution

Legislation

Law

Decree

Rules

Regulations

Policy

Strategy

National action plan

Rules

Regulations

Policy

Rules

Regulations

Policy

Rules

Regulations

Policy

Regulatory bloc

By-laws

Circulars

Rules

Regulations

Guidelines

Standards

Action plan

Implementation plan

Guidelines

Standards

Yearly operational plans

Strategy

Activity

Action plans

Implementation plan

Directives

Guidelines

Strategy

Action plans

Guidelines

Action plans

Standards

Strategies

Contracts

Conventions

Standards

Guidelines

Plans

Strategies

Guidelines

Standards

We assessed two further criteria: (1) the absence or presence of a stated budgetary line item to finance the policy measure and (2) the clear articulation of systems of accountability. We based measurements of accountability, a frequently contested concept (Brandsma and Schillemans, 2013; Pérez Durán, 2016), on key concepts of the accountability of public institutions to deliver public policy (Dubnick and Frederickson, 2009; Williams and Hunt, 2017). Systems of accountability within a policy were considered comprehensively addressed if all three of the following features were present and explicitly articulated: (1) a national lead/implementing agency is named and is assigned responsibility for reporting in the public domain; (2) a mechanism for independent monitoring of progress on implementation is described; and (3) remedial actions/sanctions/fines are outlined if implementation progress does not occur (Brandsma and Schillemans, 2013; Williams and Hunt, 2017).