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| USAID Publishes Guide for DG Officers on Administrative Law Tools and Concepts |
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| July 2008 |
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In April, USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance published a guide for Democracy and Governance Officers, titled Using Administrative Law Tools and Concepts to Strengthen USAID Programming. The report was co-authored by former IRIS Associate Director Malcolm Russell-Einhorn and Professor Howard Fenton of Ohio Northern University Law School (formerly IRIS Chief of Party for the Georgia Rule of Law Project in 2002-2003). It helps DG officers – and all legal technical assistance practitioners – become more aware of the significant development opportunities afforded by administrative law mechanisms and concepts. These concepts can improve the objectives, design, and modes of implementing many kinds of development projects, including judicial reform, rule of law, civil society strengthening, anticorruption, and regulatory reform initiatives. The Guide builds on the IRIS Center’s extensive work on administrative law in Georgia, Romania, Latvia, Macedonia, and Bosnia, including the 3 ½ year USAID Administrative Law and Procedural Systems Reform Project in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
At some point, virtually all citizens come into contact with administrative law in various regulatory and service delivery contexts – from registering a business and obtaining operating permits to filing for pension benefits. By contrast, far fewer become involved in either a country’s civil or criminal law system. As a result, attention to administrative law – particularly mechanisms like access to information requirements, public hearings, open meetings, notice-and-comment rulemaking, and advisory councils – can ground rule of law work in many sectoral regulatory arenas that affect significant constituencies. These constituencies include large sectoral interest groups (e.g., businesses, farmers, and workers) and disadvantaged citizens (including the unemployed and welfare recipients). By making the often abstract principles of the rule of law more tangible, administrative law can address a wide range of practical problems at the sectoral and local levels, exploiting multiple entry points and galvanizing key constituencies in ways that national-level judicial or legislative reform may not. Most importantly, administrative law tools can serve a complementary accountability function, empowering individuals, businesses, and other civil society actors, rather than legislators, audit agencies, or other checks-and-balances institutions, to call administrative agents to account.
The Guide is divided into four key sections that respectively address (a) introductory concepts, (b) the most important mechanisms or tools, (c) case studies illustrating the application of tools and concepts to a number of typical development scenarios and projects, and (d) ideas about how best to integrate the tools and concepts into a wide range of development programs. Development practitioners will find the case studies and discussion of program integration particularly useful insofar as they highlight the importance of balancing regulatory efficiency with issues of both fairness and predictability.
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADK999.pdf |
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| Last updated on: 11/9/2009 |
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