In the wake of a 2001 scandal over the use of government employees to assist political campaigns, public interest groups in the US state of Wisconsin pushed for reform of the state ethics and elections boards, which had been slow to respond to complaints about misuse of resources and had declined to refer suspected lawbreakers for prosecution. During the 2002 election period, gubernatorial candidates of both main parties joined the call to insulate election administration from partisan pressure. Five years of negotiation came to fruition in 2007, when the state senate and assembly voted to create a consolidated election and ethics agency directed by retired judges. The first nonpartisan election administration authority of its type in the United States, the new agency, called the Government Accountability Board, replaced a system that had vested governance of elections in a commission made up of members of both major parties. But eight years later, political alignments shifted. Arguing that the board had overreached in its handling of certain sensitive cases, state legislators in 2015 voted to shutter the institution and reverted to the pre-2007 system run by representatives of the two major political parties. This case illuminates both the circumstances that can drive politicians to introduce a nonpartisan election management system and the challenges associated with the design, implementation, and sustainability of the approach. (Note that the lead reformer in this case, Michael G. Ellis, died in 2018.)  

Daniel Dennehy and staff drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the United States from August through November 2022. Case published February 2023.

After a hack-and-leak operation that targeted a candidate in its 2017 presidential election and a social media campaign against its exports in 2020, France’s government decided to take steps to protect its politics from foreign digital interference. With another national election approaching in April 2022, Lieutenant Colonel Marc-Antoine Brillant began designing a new unit that aimed to detect foreign information manipulation while preserving freedom of speech by separating responsibility for identification of attacks from responsibility for framing and executing a response. After the proposal cleared legal hurdles, Brillant’s team, under the authority of the Secretariat-General for National Defense and Security, set up an interagency governance system, initiated a dialogue with social media platforms, and monitored social media to detect hostile campaigns. During the 2022 campaign, the unit, called Viginum, identified five foreign interference attempts and referred them to other parts of government that could decide whether and how to react. The elections ran smoothly, and the Viginum team started to focus on building stronger public understanding of its mission and activities.  

Alexis Bernigaud drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in France from August through November 2022. Case published January 2023.

In 2017, Cape Town, South Africa, was on a countdown to disaster. An unprecedented and wholly unforeseen third consecutive year of drought threatened to cut off water to the city’s four million citizens. Faced with the prospect of running dangerously low on potable water, local officials raced against time to avert “Day Zero”—the date on which they would have to shut off drinking water to most businesses and homes in the city. Cape Town’s government responded effectively to the fast-worsening and potentially cataclysmic situation. Key to the effort was a broad, multipronged information campaign that overcame skepticism and enlisted the support of a socially and economically diverse citizenry as well as private companies. Combined with other measures such as improving data management and upgrading technology, the strategy averted disaster. By the time the drought eased in 2018, Capetonians had cut their water usage by nearly 60% from 2015 levels. With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town achieved one of the lowest per capita water consumption rates of any major city in the world. The success set a benchmark for cities around the world that confront the uncertainties of a shifting global climate.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2018. Case published February 2019.

Upon assuming office in mid-2007, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad faced an economy in shambles. Devastated by a loss of revenues and international aid in the wake of Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, which brought to power politicians deemed terrorists by some in the international community, average real gross domestic product per capita in the West Bank and Gaza was about 40% below its 1999 level, and the government was broke. To restart the economy and demonstrate that the Palestinian Authority could manage a socioeconomic crisis in a manner befitting a sovereign state, Fayyad and his colleagues created a detailed development plan that helped secure financial resources from international donors. With that money, the government undertook an ambitious community development program, building thousands of small-scale infrastructure projects across the West Bank. It also negotiated an easing of some of the Israeli-imposed movement restrictions that were stifling both commerce and investment. The West Bank then posted two years of double-digit economic growth and expanded, private-sector activity, but the occupation’s political challenges stymied the Fayyad government’s ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood. 

Jennifer Widner, Tristan Dreisbach, and Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and in other locations during 2019 and 2020. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published June 2022.

“Security was the toughest part of the job,” Salam Fayyad said, reflecting on his first two years as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. The second intifada, a five-year uprising against Israeli occupation, had just wound down, leaving in its wake an epidemic of crime and lawlessness in the West Bank. To restore order and to demonstrate that authority could fulfill this most primary function of a state, Fayyad worked with security chiefs to revive the mission of the Palestinian Security Services and enhance their professionalism, to deploy the civil police, and to get gunmen off the streets. Those steps required strategies for both introducing reform in opaque systems and persuading people that better policing was not tantamount to supporting an occupying state. By the end of 2007, six months after he assumed office, crime rates were down and public perceptions of safety had started to improve. Still, continued Israeli interference in the West Bank’s internal security plus other persistent challenges undermined efforts to maintain a functional and sovereign security apparatus.

Jennifer Widner, Tristan Dreisbach, and Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and in Princeton, New Jersey, and other locations during 2019 and 2020. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published June 2022.

In 2007, Salam Fayyad accepted the dual post of finance minister and prime minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA). The financial management practices he implemented during his first period as finance minister, from 2002 to 2004, had deteriorated. During the preceding two years, from November 2005 to March 2007, the government had resumed dealing largely in cash, had kept poor records of government financial transactions, and had added more employees to an already bloated public payroll. To reinstitute good practices and implement new reforms, Fayyad and his finance ministry colleagues also had to overcome challenges related to the division of the Palestinian territories into two separate areas governed by competing political parties. Fayyad relied heavily on a small group of trusted staff, delegated important responsibilities so he could also take on the demanding job of prime minister, and set clear guidelines to maximize the long-term benefits from any external technical assistance the ministry hired.  Under his guidance, the ministry rehabilitated financial records and quickly created a new financial information system by adapting existing, locally built software; reformed the way the PA used commercial bank accounts to conduct its financial transactions; and filled gaps in capacity.  

Tristan Dreisbach and staff drafted this case study based on multiple conversations with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, during 2019, as well as other interviews conducted in Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho, and Washington, D.C. the same year.  The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine in 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published June 2022.

In mid-2020, Tunisia stood out as a star within its region. The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic had taken a high toll in the Middle East and North Africa. But by the end of the second week of August, as the first wave ebbed, Tunisia had recorded 149 cumulative cases per million people—compared with more than 800 per million in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and most of the rest of the region. Tunisia’s epidemic curve was almost flat. However, the good news was short-lived. By mid-August, the number of COVID-19 cases had started to rise, and by October the number of cases per million in Tunisia matched that of other countries in the area. A year later, Tunisia was a regional hot spot. This case study profiles the difficulty of containing the spread of disease when local governments are new and have limited capacity, when public health guidance from a national government modulates or weakens, and when political distrust runs high.

Mariam Ghanem and ISS staff researched and wrote this case based on research conducted during May, June, and July 2021. Case published January 2022. This case study was supported by the United Nations Development Programme Crisis Bureau as part of a series on center-of-government coordination of the pandemic response.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations, including UNDP, or the UN Member States.

Despite having a sophisticated health-care system and spending more on health care than do most countries in the world, by the early 2010s the Netherlands experienced some of the poorest perinatal-health outcomes in the European Union. Birth-related complications among women and infants were driven primarily by economic and social inequality. For example, women living in the country’s low-income neighborhoods were up to four times more likely to die during childbirth than the Dutch average. In partnership with university researchers, the municipalities of Rotterdam, Groningen, and Tilburg began tackling the problem. After discovering that the growing disparities in perinatal health outcomes were driven in large part by social and economic challenges rather than by purely medical factors, the cities set out to build integrated, multisectoral teams­—local coalitions—that brought together service providers working in both the health-care and social domains. To tailor care to an individual patient’s own circumstances, the coalitions transcended the traditional boundaries that separated physicians, midwives, municipal officials, social workers, and other service providers. They worked to integrate their records and come to agreement on ways to monitor progress, and they designed referral systems and procedural road maps to deal with specific and individual client problems. In 2018, the national Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport expanded the use of such local coalitions to reduce early-childhood health disparities in municipalities throughout the country. By early 2022, 275 of the Netherlands’ 345 municipalities were participating in the program, dubbed Solid Start, and the new national government pledged to expand the program to every municipality in the country.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted between September 2021 and April 2022. Case published May 2022. This case study was supported by Bernard van Leer Foundation as part of a policy learning initiative. Please note that the Solid Start program described in the case is not an instance of the foundation’s Urban95 strategy, which features in several other ISS case studies that are part of the learning project.

When Salam Fayyad became finance minister of the Palestinian Authority in June 2002, the interim government was starved for cash and faced strong internal and external pressure for reform. To ensure the government could manage revenues and expenditures with fidelity, Fayyad had to improve the functioning and the professionalism of the ministry. He moved quickly to revise core procedures and change the organization’s culture. As he did so, he also began to transform the ministry from an organization based on personal allegiances into one based on institutional policies and standards. Success in that arena during the next three years depended on building coalitions to maintain support for reform as well as marshaling capacity within the ministry itself—by reshaping expectations, centralizing control, unifying geographically divided operations, and fostering talent.

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