Institutional and context analysis. Guidance note.

A development programme succeeds when key players have an incentive to make it succeed. When a society’s key actors are threatened by a development programme, they have an incentive to make it fail. Understanding how different actors in society – bureaucrats, farmers, industrialists, incumbents, opposition parties, religious authorities, groups of men or women, and more – have differing incentives to enable or block development interventions is key to successful programming. All actors have distinct histories and – crucially – face constraints, such as institutional limits on their power, a weak resource base, or an inability to act collectively. This means that only some have the ability to act on an incentive. Illuminating this mixture of incentives and constraints is the aim of Institutional and Context Analysis (ICA) at the country level.

This Guidance Note has emerged as a direct response to demand from Country Offices for a resource that helps UNDP staff understand the political and institutional context in which they operate in a way that is suited to the needs and mandate of the organization. It offers practical guidance to UNDP Country Offices on how to use ICA to assess the enabling environment. The term ‘institutional and context analysis’ refers to analyses that focus on political and institutional factors, as well as processes concerning the use of national and external resources in a given setting and how these have an impact on the implementation of UNDP programmes and policy advice. An ICA is envisioned as an input to programming that focuses on how different actors in society, who are subject to an assortment of incentives and constraints, shape the likelihood of programme success. This Guidance Note offers ideas on undertaking country level ICA to develop a Country Programme (Chapter 1) and conducting an ICA at the sector or project level (Chapter 2).