Judicial reform, real results, and politics

I've just looked over a World Bank assessing the performance of a judicial modernization project in Azerbaijan. You can find it here: Azerbaijan Judicial Modernization Project. Its a pretty damning document, and reminds me a lot of one I read some years ago about a project in, I think, Uzbekistan trying to do much the same thing. (I can't seem to quickly track down the Uzbek project; if I find it, I'll include the link.) The assessment lists a litany of things that went wrong: unrealistic project goals, use of vague terminology and catch-phrases with little idea of what they mean, poor planning, little buy-in from the government, and a lack of expertise and capacity, among other things. The overall project was rated "unsatisfactory" and it sounds like little or nothing was really accomplished, other than convincing the people of Azerbaijan that the World Bank has no idea what its talking about.

It reminded me a lot of projects I looked at in India during my research time there. I heard a lot of stories about "trainings" for Indian judges and judicial officials, during which most of the participants were playing games on their phones or just napping. Its not that they don't care about doing their jobs well, but more that they doubt these trainers know anything they don't already. Its also because these projects don't really get at the political and bureaucratic problems that hold back effective legal processes. Its not about just throwing around phrases like "transparency" or "rule of law" and then getting the judges on board; they're part of a system that moves on whatever they're doing; and in any bureaucracy, the incentives imposed on actors by the system are far more powerful than than whatever new ideas (often not really so new) are brought by well-meaning foreigners.

What could make these programs more effective? One problem, I think, is that the incentives for Bank and UNDP staff, for example, are just way, way different than those of local staff. Development agency personnel still feel pressure to "get things done": to set up a project, hire consultants, hold trainings. When its found that the project was a dud, most of these staff will have moved on anyway. That's an old problem. Also, these agencies are still only at the beginning of really tackling the governance problems that lie at the heart of these inefficiencies. No one truly wants to tackle the big problems, like fighting the corruption that leads judges and lawyers to act arbitrarily; its just too political. I think that staff is slowly starting to appreciate that they have to get into the guts of a political system to affect real change in governance, but there is a long way to go.