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Press Release: Western-Backed Law Reform Often Misses the Mark
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 26, 2005
CONTACT: Cara Santos Pianesi, 202/939-2211, csantos@CarnegieEndowment.org
Western experts have not assimilated the lessons of two decades of experience in supporting law reform in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the newest paper from the Carnegie Endowment’s Rule of Law Series, legal reform expert Wade Channell diagnoses shortcomings of such efforts, identifying their causes and proposing needed changes.
Lessons Not Learned: Problems in Western Aid for Law Reform in Postcommunist Countries is available here.
In many postcommunist countries, little actual change has taken place with respect to legal reform, despite significant Western aid initiatives. Even in the more successful transition countries, many new laws are not effectively implemented. In some cases, application of well-crafted laws has been hijacked by vested interests.
Why this poor track record? Channell cites three commonly known problems faced by rule-of-law practitioners: lack of home-country ownership and buy-in; insufficient resources to permit sustained participation; and excessive segmentation that ignores systemic problems.
Importantly, Channell also tackles why practitioners have failed to learn from the previous mistakes, identifying two root causes. First, aid practitioners hold a set of mistaken assumptions about the importance of laws, role of government, impact of culture, and level of existing knowledge about rule of law change. The second problem is one of incentives. Competitively priced project selection rewards repetition, not innovation. When lessons are learned, they are not shared, because incentives encourage the guarding of knowledge. A disconnection between performance and awards in legal reform assistance also exacerbates this problem.
Change can happen by correcting assumptions and adjusting incentives. Channel emphasizes that the legal reform community must recognize law as a tool for reform, not its goal. This will allow practitioners to gear efforts toward the real goal: socioeconomic prosperity.
Wade Channell is a Brussels-based independent consultant specializing in legal reform and economic development issues. He has worked in more than 35 countries.
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Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.