In this interview, South Bend, Indiana Chief Innovation Officer Santiago Garces discusses the creation of the innovation and technology unit within South Bend’s city government. Garces recounts the path that took him from Bogota, Colombia to Indiana.  He discusses early projects to identify areas in which government could operate more efficiently and effectively, as well as the evolution of a small innovation office into a full-fledged department. Garces talks about creating a business analytics team, consolidating the city’s information technology (IT) services into one office, and making IT more efficient by outsourcing some services and moving to the cloud. He also explains how his team managed resistance to change and shares some lessons learned for other municipalities interested in creating innovation units.

Santiago Garces video clips: 

Business Mapping 

The Hardest Parts of the Exercise

In this interview, South Bend, Indiana, mayor Peter Buttigieg discusses how his administration used innovation and technology to improve municipal government. He explains how his background in consulting informed his use of data to make government more effective and speaks about how civic innovation can help solve the toughest problems his community faces in the face of serious financial constraints, including a state-wide property tax cap. He hired Santiago Garces, a young Notre Dame graduate, to create an innovation office that helped implement the mayor’s biggest policy priorities, including dealing with the city’s many vacant and abandoned properties. He lauds the performance of the city’s business analysts, who worked with city departments to identify problems in their business processes and help them become more efficient and effective. Buttigieg also talks about dealing with internal resistance to new policies. He advises other cities to build partnerships with external actors that can help them harness data and innovation and discusses the importance of government employees having a results mentality, as opposed to a compliance mentality.

In this interview, John Pollock talks about the motivation behind founding the Heirs’ Property Retention Coalition (HPRC), a network dedicated to preventing the forced sale of ancestral property. He discusses his role in drafting the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (Uniform Act), which aims to preserve family wealth. Pollock describes how the Uniform Law Commission, the chief authority on model state laws, accepted this proposed act, as well as the drafting process after the commission’s acceptance. He talks about the difficulty negotiating with opposition in the commission and various states that have adopted the Uniform Act. Pollock also talks about the links between urban blight and heirs’ property issues and the use of other reforms, including heirship affidavits, to prove ownership. He describes myths surrounding heirs’ property and the issues associated with dividing property between heirs. Lastly, Pollock talks about the difficulties associated with monitoring the success of the Uniform Act and the adverse effects of forced sale. 

In this interview, Christy Kane talks about the creation of Louisiana Appleseed, an advocacy organization that works to solve societal problems by altering public policy. She was initially an attorney at Adams and Reese LLP, a law firm that incubated Louisiana Appleseed, and soon became the organization’s executive director. Kane discusses Louisiana Appleseed’s efforts to reform property and heirship laws after natural disasters, so that people could get access to funding to repair their homes. She talks about the process of proposing changes to the law, negotiating, and compromising with opposition, as well as the features of Louisiana's civil law system. Kane also discusses Louisiana Appleseed’s collaboration with Appleseed centers in other states to promote disaster recovery on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Lastly, she talks about working with local organizations to make sure that any change in legislation actually benefits the people it was meant to help.

In this interview, Thulisile Madonsela talks about how she transformed the office of public protector into a powerful anti-corruption agency. After a career working in the trade union movement and the Department of Justice, Madonsela became South Africa’s public protector in 2009. The office, established by the constitution in 1995, had a mandate to investigate government misconduct but had primarily worked on administrative justice cases. Faced with an influx of corruption complaints when she took office, Madonsela began to reorganize the agency to better handle that caseload. She identified three main problems she needed to solve: assigning more investigators to corruption cases, creating a triage function to sort through a growing number of complaints, and increasing impact at the level of local government. To achieve these goals, she had to change the culture and performance expectations within the office and secure more financial resources during a difficult period for South Africa’s economy. Madonsela reorganized the office to create an anti-corruption unit, developed triaging criteria, decentralized some functions to provincial offices, created standard operating procedures for investigators, revamped the staff training program, and recruited auditors and forensic investigators. As the reports she released gained attention and brought to light instances of high-level corruption, resistance to her work grew. Madonsela had to fend off accusations and threats and found it increasingly difficult to get resources from parliament. She took care to avoid attacking individuals in the media, to present the investigations as statements of fact, and to link acts of financial misconduct to the suffering of poor South Africans. A 2015 Supreme Court of Appeal ruling further empowered the public protector by declaring that agencies could not ignore the office’s recommendations for remedial action. 

In this interview, World Bank environmental economist Stefano Pagiola discusses his role in the development of payment for environmental services (PES) programs in Costa Rica and Mexico. He begins by discussing the World Bank's role in improving payment and service targeting in Mexican and Costa Rican PES programs based on environmental/biodiversity and cost-effectiveness economic analyses. He then describes technical challenges faced in the implementation of Costa Rica's PES program, and similar challenges due to up-scaling the program for Mexico. Next, Pagiola outlines the political challenges PES faced in both countries and how the programs were re-shaped to better attract political support. Finally, he discusses difficulties in formulating an impact evaluation for these PES programs, and how they have been received in implementing countries in Latin America. 

In this interview, Dan Hymowitz describes the successes and challenges of the Ebola response in Liberia from November 2014 through March 2015. He details the structure of the National Incident Management System in Liberia that responded to Ebola and how the response in greater Monrovia mimicked the national response. He describes the importance of decentralizing the response in greater Monrovia and how methods changed as the number of new cases decreased. He emphasizes the importance of well-defined roles for various actors within the response and details the challenges of government collaboration with international organizations. He also discusses the challenges of the “last mile” of the response and how creativity and flexibility were key at this stage.

In this interview, Raphael Frankfurter describes overseeing the Wellbody Alliance clinic’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Kono, Sierra Leone. He recounts succeeding where other organizations failed by institutionalizing empathy, tightening protective protocol for health workers, and coordinating with partners to streamline treatment. In particular, Frankfurter attributes Sierra Leoneans’ exceptional degree of cooperation with Wellbody to the pairing of each patient with a community health worker. He explains how Wellbody benefited from a mostly local staff, with a structure that promoted vital conversations among community health workers, supervisors, and managers. He notes that discussions with local leaders, residents, and traditional healers helped the organization identify and serve the area’s needs. Based on various players’ achievements and setbacks in the field, Frankfurter concludes that to effectively deliver care, healthcare providers should respect patients as humans from the beginning.

As a follow up to her 2009 interview, Sri Mulyani Indrawati revisits her years as Indonesia’s minister of finance to discuss the challenges of building her economic reform team and institutionalizing performance management at the ministry.  She describes how she worked closely with key members of the KPK (Corruption Eradication Commission) to cultivate motivation and teamwork among government employees.  With the support of her reform team, she established institutional mechanisms to reduce corruption and raise the credibility of the government.  And although Indonesia’s bureaucracy proved to challenge the reform team at times, she explains how performance indicators and standard operating procedures were instrumental to identify and overcome weaknesses in the Ministry of Finance.  In conclusion, Sri Mulyani reflects on the more personal attributes required to move sustainable reform forward: a strong vision along with the trust and commitment of her fellow reformers.   She describes the practice of public asset disclosure as one of the most sustainable reforms her team implemented at the ministry. 

In this interview, Nadim Matta explains the philosophy and logistics of the Rapid Results Initiatives (RRIs). He describes how these highly choreographed 100-day projects, once introduced into large-scale programs, forge ownership and accountability for results at the local level. Furthermore, he discusses the creation of the RRIs and his projects with the World Bank. He talks about instances of RRI implementation in Nicaragua, Madagascar and Eritrea, describing the different forms of project management, leadership support and civil service rules. Finally, he notes contexts in which RRIs are more likely to succeed and potential roadblocks to results. 

Case Studies:  Building Capacity, Changing Norms: Rapid Results in Madagascar, 2005-2009, Enhancing Capacity, Changing Behaviors: Rapid Results in Gashaki, Rwanda, 2008, and Building A Culture Of Results: Institutionalizing Rapid Results Initiatives In Kenya, 2005-2009