When Salam Fayyad became finance minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in June 2002, the government was struggling to manage expenditures effectively and to deliver the budget to the legislative council on time. Success in addressing those problems required winning acceptance from President Yasser Arafat and other top officials for new work processes, securing other ministries’ compliance with changes in operations, and instituting radical new levels of transparency. Fayyad focused on fixing the system instead of investigating past malfeasance. Under his watch, the finance ministry began engaging with the council’s budget and finance committee, instituting monthly financial reporting, introducing reliable internal control and audit procedures, and adopting internationally recognized transparency measures. Those reforms enhanced the credibility of the authority’s financial management internationally, restarted the flow of external aid and PA revenues withheld by Israel, and helped temporarily end a financial crisis.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and on a series of conversations with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, the same year. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published March 2022.

When Salam Fayyad became the Palestinian Authority’s finance minister in June 2002, one of his biggest challenges was to improve financial management in the security sector. To pay police, emergency workers, and other security personnel, commanders handed out cash to subordinates—a practice that was demeaning and that created opportunities for corruption. Procurement of equipment and supplies was neither open nor competitive and took place outside scrutiny by the finance ministry, which had little or no way of knowing where the government’s money ended up. To address the problems, Fayyad, a political outsider, had to take on a deep-rooted culture of secrecy, the reluctance of a powerful president, and resistance from some of the security officials. He began to tighten controls by working with a reform-minded legislature to incorporate procedural changes into the 2003 budget law. He then identified security service chiefs who were open to payroll reform, and he helped them become early adopters. After more than a year of private persuasion, backed by growing public discontent with corruption, Fayyad was able to implement reforms that reduced opportunities to divert funds and that increased security workers’ take-home pay. He also put security forces’ procurement activities under finance ministry oversight, thereby further limiting the risk of corruption.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and on a series of conversations with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, the same year. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published March 2022.

In 2010, the government, private businesses, and local universities in the northern Mexico state of Nuevo León forged an unusual alliance to design and implement sweeping law-enforcement reforms in a challenging context. At the time, powerful drug cartels were fighting increasingly bitter and bloody wars to control their turf—which intimidated an existing police service already hampered by low pay, weak morale, corruption, and disorganization. Public confidence in the state’s ability to maintain order had evaporated. During the next five years, the public–private partnership oversaw the creation of an entirely new police service that, in tandem with other reforms, significantly strengthened the state’s capacity to ensure public safety and helped rebuild public confidence.

Patrick Signoret drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in March and April 2018 and on earlier research carried out by Ariana Markowitz and Alejandra Rangel Smith in October 2014. New York University’s Marron Institute helped support Alejandra Rangel Smith’s participation. Case published July 2018.

Following the 1994 transition from racial apartheid to democracy, South Africa’s government aimed to provide tenure security for the estimated 16 million black South Africans living in communal areas. But the lack of a clear legal framework applicable to most communal areas meant that progress was slow. In contrast, a viable legal framework did exist to guide tenure reform in smaller communal areas formerly known as “coloured reserves,” where a series of apartheid laws had settled people of mixed race. In 2009, land reform Minister Gugile Nkwiti designated one such area—Ebenhaeser, on the country’s west coast—as a rural “flagship” project. The aim was both to transfer land held in trust by the government to Ebenhaeser community members and to settle a restitution claim. Provincial officials from Nkwinti’s ministry, working with private consultants, organized a communal association to serve as landowner. They helped negotiate an agreement with white farmers to return land that had originally belonged to coloured residents. The community also developed a land administration plan that would pave the way for Ebenhaeser’s residents to become the legal owners of their communal territory.

Lessons Learned

• A legal framework to guide tenure reform in communal areas is vital. The lack of a law to guide the process in the former homelands made it nearly impossible to make any progress in those regions.
• In many of the communal areas of South Africa, the key question is whether traditional leaders should become legal landholding entities. Despite the lack of capacity that hampered many CPAs, Ebenhaeser’s experience offers an alternative to granting legal ownership to traditional leaders.
• A strong, high-level project steering committee was critical for driving implementation. The project required cooperation between a range of different stakeholders. And the creation of a central venue encouraged that collaboration.
• Providing communities with financial and human resources support after they obtain ownership over communal lands is crucial. Documentation proving they were landowners was not enough to immediately enable the Ebenhaeser CPA to use its land productively or access credit.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study with Professor Grenville Barnes of the University of Florida-Gainesville based on interviews they conducted in the Western Cape, Gauteng, and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa, in March 2017. Case published May 2017.

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of David Mayson - Managing Director, Phuhlisani

After the 1994 genocide that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Rwanda’s tax collection collapsed to $132 million in 1996 from $225 million in 1990. Aside from its desperate need for money to pay for reconstruction, the new unity government, led by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, was also determined to break its dependence on foreign donors by becoming entirely self-funding. To do that, Kagame’s government had to convince a traumatized and distrustful public to pay its fair share of taxes. In 1998, the government replaced the existing tax and customs departments with the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA), a semiautonomous tax agency. The RRA overhauled tax collection procedures, increased staff capacity, improved information management, and launched a massive and sustained public education campaign in an effort to build a new social contract. As a result, in 2017 Rwanda collected in three weeks the same amount of tax it had collected annually a dozen years earlier. From 1998 to 2017, Rwanda’s tax-to-GDP ratio improved from 10.8% to 16.7%, and total tax revenues collected grew more than 10-fold to $1.3 billion. Moreover, from 2007 to 2017 alone, the number of registered taxpayers grew 13-fold—from 26,526 to 355,128—though Rwanda was one of the world’s poorest countries and most of its labor force of 6.3 million still had incomes below the threshold that made them tax eligible. By 2017, the government financed 62% of its annual budget from domestic tax revenues, up from just 39% in 2000. The country was on its way to ending donor dependence.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kigali, Rwanda in March 2018. Case published May 2018.

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In the mid 2000s, Indonesia’s Directorate General of Taxes (DGT) was still struggling to recover from the shock of the Asian financial crisis of the previous decade. Tax revenue had plummeted during the crisis, and the collection rate remained well below accepted standards, as well as below the standards of many peers in the region. In 2006, the directorate’s new leaders launched a nationwide overhaul, drawing lessons from a successful pilot program that had reorganized the DGT’s biggest offices and enabled large taxpayers to settle all of their tax-related affairs with a single visit to one office rather than having to go through multiple steps. Expanding that pilot to more than 300 locations across a 3,000-mile archipelago presented no small challenge. The implementers built a digital database that linked all offices to a central server in the capital of Jakarta, developed competency testing and training that bolstered the quality of staff, and created new positions to improve relationships with taxpayers. Other measures aimed to reduce corruption and tax fraud. When political and practical crosswinds frustrated the DGT’s efforts to build the workforce its leaders thought it needed, the agency turned to big-data analytics to improve compliance and broaden the tax base. By 2018, domestic revenue mobilization had plateaued, but the changes introduced had produced important improvements. The question was then what to do to broaden the base further without decreasing incentives for investment or raising administrative costs to unsustainable levels.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta in January and February 2018. Case published April 2018.

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By the early 2000s, traffic in Senegal's capital city of Dakar had become unbearable. A skyrocketing number of vehicles strained the city's infrastructure, and traffic jams choked not only the major road into and out of town but also the region's economic growth. A new highway that would ease road congestion had been planned decades earlier but had been shelved because of the cost, complexity, and difficulty of financing. Abdoulaye Wade, elected president in 2000, sought a new solution: a public-private partnership. The plan called for a private company to contribute a portion of the cost of the highway's construction and then to maintain the highway-in exchange for toll revenues-with the rest of the up-front costs borne by the government. Executing the first such partnership of its kind in the region would not be easy. In addition to identifying and resolving complex technical and financial aspects of the partnership, government planners had to find ways to mitigate extensive social and environmental impacts of the project-including the displacement of 30,000 people from their homes and businesses. Senegal's newly created Agency for Investment Promotion and Major Works led the process of selecting the partner company, overseeing construction, and coordinating implementation with institutions ranging from Senegalese ministries to international development banks and community associations. Once it opened in August 2013, the Dakar-Diamniadio toll highway saw greater use than expected and alleviated congestion in the capital. But delays in the resettlement of people displaced by the project meant that some problems persisted into 2016.

Maya Gainer, ISS Research Specialist, and Stefanie Chan of Sciences Po's Paris School of International Affairs, drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Dakar, Senegal, and Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, in January 2016. This case study was funded by the French Development Agency. Case published May 2016.

In the early 2000s, deforestation accelerated in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and global environmental groups began to raise the alarm. Greenpeace, one of the most vocal groups, published a report that placed the blame partly on the soy industry, which had grown rapidly in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. In response, industry representatives joined with nongovernmental organizations, financial institutions, supermarkets, and others in the soy supply chain to form the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS). Following the model of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which worked to transform the environmentally destructive palm oil industry in Southeast Asia, the RTRS wanted to implement a supply chain certification system to help identify whether harvests came from land deforested without regard for environmental impact and nudge soy farmers into a new era of sustainable production. The roundtable participants successfully developed a standard for responsible practices, and enrolled a number of large farm enterprises. But low demand for certified soy and the high cost of becoming certified slowed progress, especially among smaller producers. As of 2017, less than 1% of soy produced in Brazil was RTRS certified, and uncertified landholders continued to convert important natural ecosystems into soy farms. Although the RTRS succeeded in bringing together key players in the soy industry to talk about sustainability for the first time, it was clear that complementary efforts were necessary to shift the soy industry as a whole toward environmentally friendly production.

In 2007, multinational consumer goods company Unilever launched a partnership with the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) to help bring Kenya’s more than 500,000 small-scale tea farmers up to the certification standard set by the Sustainable Agriculture Network, a global coalition of environmental organizations. To participate, farmers had to fulfill dozens of criteria related to worker safety, environmental management, and agricultural practices. The KTDA, a private company that had been government run until 2000, was able to roll out certification quickly and on an unprecedented scale, thanks to its large market share, its rapport with farmers, the willingness of multinational companies to support high-quality sustainably grown tea, and funding by donor organizations. By mid 2016, all of Kenya’s smallholders had met certification standards, and Unilever’s flagship Lipton brand was selling 100%-certified tea. Soon after, other major global brands met the same target. Farmers pointed to increased yields, stronger health and safety procedures, and improved livelihoods as benefits of the certification initiative.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kenya in January and February 2017. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published May 2017.

In 1999, eight years after emerging from decades of Soviet domination, Kyrgyzstan began an ambitious effort to officially recognize property ownership throughout the country and lay the groundwork for a vibrant real estate market. During five and a half decades of rule by the Soviet Union, citizens were not allowed to own land, and after Kyrgyzstani independence in 1991, the country began a nationwide program of privatization in a bid to stimulate economic development. The question was how to register and document property rights so that people could transact efficiently in a new land market. To meet the challenge, a new land agency, known as Gosregister, had to hire and train staff in completely new responsibilities, establish performance management and funding structures, improve efficiency by introducing new technologies, and ensure that staff did not engage in corruption. Despite political upheaval—including the overthrow of two governments in the space of five years—Gosregister steadily built its capacity and evolved into an effective land registry. By 2012, the agency had registered 92% of the country’s privately held parcels, and in 2017, the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings recognized its services as among the best in the world.

Maya Gainer drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Bishkek and Kant, Kyrgyzstan, during November and December 2016. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published February 2017