How can it be that people who should have the most fulfilling jobs in the world are generally far less engaged and productive than those we encounter in the private sector? The root causes, we believe, are organizational cultures that are strangled by rules. Myriad rules define the public-sector workplace—rules spelling out procedural red tape, layers of decision making, regulatory compliance, and employee safeguards. These rules are put in place for the best of reasons, such as to ensure fair hiring practices and prevent corruption, favoritism, and the influence of special interests. But as rules proliferate, they often congeal into inefficient, costly bureaucracies that slow decision making, stifle initiative, discourage cooperation, and frustrate employees.

This Framework outlines key considerations for developing a party’s gender policy, and addresses a variety of thematic areas essential for the advancement of women and promotion of gender equality within political parties, including leadership formation, internal decision making, internal oversight and institutional development, candidate recruitment, party programmes and platform development, outreach to voters, and campaigns.

Guidelines for public institutions based on the experience of the Government of Catalonia

This publication expands and builds on an earlier report, The State of Pacific Towns and Cities: Urbanization in ADB’s Pacific Developing Member Countries, by examining in greater depth the need for a quantum shift in how development agencies, practitioners, and researchers perceive and address the needs of those urban residents who live in some form of urban village and often in hardship and poverty. 

Local councils in the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia are starting to give serious consideration to how they can include ‘sustainability’ in their planning for the future. There is no statutory requirement to create a sustainability plan – and therefore no standard definition of what constitutes such a plan for local government in NSW. The same is true of the term ‘sustainability’, for which there is no standard or legislative definition. However, the NSW state division of Local Government Managers Australia (LGMA - a professional organization for council managers) has recently released a ‘Sustainability Health Check’ as a resource to assist councils in assessing their current performance and devising appropriate strategies and action plans for sustainability. In addition, several individual councils have used the opportunity provided by the state government’s Urban Sustainability Program to make a first attempt at developing a sustainability plan.