The Viet Nam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) 2012

The Viet Nam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) 2012

June 3, 2013

The Viet Nam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) is a joint collaboration between the Centre for Community Support Development Studies (CECODES) under the Viet Nam Union of Science and Technology Associations (VUSTA), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Viet Nam since 2009, with the close partnership and support of the Centre for Theory Work of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front from 2009-2010, the Front Review from 2010-2012, the Commission for People’s Petitions under the National Assembly Steering Committee in 2012, and the Centre for Research and Training of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front—VFF-CRT from 2013.

The 2012 PAPI survey is the result of several years of fine-tuning. The first PAPI survey was piloted in three provinces in 2009 and then expanded to 30 provinces in 2010. Through these first two iterations, questions were adjusted to better capture citizen experiences. In 2011 PAPI was conducted for the first time in all 63 provinces in Viet Nam. The questions that form the basis of the PAPI findings were also finalized. From this point on, PAPI will not only be able to provide a useful indicator for central and local government performance, but also a metric to assess how performance has changed over time.

PAPI assesses three mutually reinforcing processes: policy making, policy implementation and the monitoring of public service delivery. The dimensions are specifically tailored to Viet Nam’s national and local level contexts. The philosophy behind PAPI’s innovative policy monitoring approach is that citizens are seens as “end-users of public administrative services” capable of assessing governance and public administration in their localities. The end result is Viet Nam’s first publically available dataset providing an objective evaluation of governance from the perspective of citizens. Based on this citizen input, PAPI provides a set of objective indicators that help assess the performance in governance and public administration, while at the same time providing an incentive for provinces to improve their performance over the long term. PAPI is supported substantively and technically by a national advisory board and a group of international governance measurement experts.

CECODES, VFF and UNDP aim to support improvements in transparency; stimulate reform; enlarge the ‘space’ for citizen participation in policy planning, implementation, and monitoring; as well as to significantly expand the pool of quantitative data available for policy formulation and improvement.

Document Type
Regions and Countries