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Continuity and Change in Postconflict Sierra Leone
award the contract to Income Electrix Limited even before the bidding process had commenced.”33 It also recommended that institutional clarification be made regarding the role of the MoEWR, which is supposed to oversee the NPA and the NPC.34
Operational Implications at the Sector Level Overall, the two infrastructure sectors provide interesting, although largely anecdotal and incomplete, illustrations of how political elites in Sierra Leone across successive governments have sought to maneuver between public policy promises of improvements and increases in spending within constrained resource envelopes. The illustrations also reveal political elites’ efforts at maintaining close political control through the use of appointment powers and some apparent efforts to facilitate interelite sharing of rents and benefits available in the two sectors.35 If sector governance is a key roadblock to achieving better performance in infrastructure, then the first-best policy option would be to seek reforms of the formal institutional arrangements and to strengthen the resulting institutions. According to the analysis, national elites have a big stake in protecting the status quo, because they benefit from the systematic dysfunctions and governance failures characterizing these sectors. Therefore, although recent reforms have the potential to significantly improve the prospects of sector governance, implementing those reforms remains difficult. It follows that the scope of change that can be expected in the behavior of key players (such as the SLRA and the NPA) is limited, at least in the short term. Given that politics at the national level has shown considerable continuity through the pre- and postwar environment, how the sectors are managed de facto is unlikely to change even when changes to formal institutional a rrangements are put in place. Given these challenges, the recommendations emerging from the sector analysis are (a) to use results- and performance-based instruments where possible, (b) to calibrate World Bank engagement relative to observed governance scenarios in the two sectors, and (c) to support decentralization of roads and power services to LCs where technically feasible. In addition, the analysis emphasized the need for seeking a more intensive dialogue with reform supporters and constituents. The study identified three illustrative governance scenarios for each sector and suggested calibrating the extent of engagement depending on which level of actual reform traction would actually be observed. Furthermore, the study suggested using forms of results-based lending, whereby donors agree to provide funding against observable delivery of progress. For example, government and donors could agree on a program of road maintenance or rehabilitation with disbursements being made upon verification of completion of work or of stages of work. On the devolution of responsibility, the study recommended that development partners should focus on empowering subnational authorities as a way to reduce the concentration of power in the sectors. The study also suggested that Problem-Driven Political Economy Analysis • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0121-1