Made2Measure

Saudi Arabia is a party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, commonly known as the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT). The Kingdom’s own criminal code contains safeguards against ill-treatment and torture of detainees. And yet, according to troubling accounts widely reported last   week, advisors to the Saudi royal family, human rights activists, and others with knowledge of the torture of detainees, said that Saudi security officers tortured eight of 18 jailed women’s-right activists this year (“Saudi Women’s Rights Activist Face Torture,” Wall Street Journal , November 21, 2018; “Jailed Saudi Women’s Rights Activists Said to Suffer Abuse,” Washington Post, November 21, 2018). Together with the October 2, 2018   murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, these accounts of alleged incidents of psychological and physical torture, including sleep deprivation, electric shocks, and...

Do the formal safeguards of judicial independence and the separation of powers of the judicial branch impede a whole-of-government approach to addressing complex public policy problems that require inter-agency communication, coordination, and collaboration across all three branches of government? This question plus my tentative answer, namely that the de jure and de facto safeguards of judicial independence and separation of powers constitute a serious impediment to the whole- of- government approach, were prompted by my participation in two events in the last two weeks. The most recent was the Inaugural Whole of Government National Security Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, April 20, 2018, sponsored by the William & Mary’s Whole of Government Center of Excellence . Variously termed “one-stop government” and “joined-up government,” “whole-of-government” represents a change in emphasis away from organizational devolution, disaggregation, and single-purpose organiza...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially known as “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” including Goal 16, the “justice, peace, and inclusive institutions” goal, were hailed by former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as nothing less than “a defining moment in human history.” Critics called the SDGs “a mess.”   There’s much agreement on both accounts. The SDGs are lofty, ambitious, and inspirational. And they are vague and ill-defined. This provides an opening for justice systems and their stakeholders across the globe to leverage the SDGs to serve their national priorities and goals and perhaps even shape international goals. In Uzbekistan This essentially was my message to an international conference , “Modern Judicial Mechanisms for Reliable Protection of the Rights and Legitimate Interests of Entrepreneurs: Experience of Uzbekistan and International Practices,” in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The conference was organized by the ...

Replication of research -- the reproducibility of findings -- is a methodological safeguard and hallmark of research universally lauded by scientists to justify their craft.   As we are continuing to learn with more certainty, it is theory not much put into practice. Claims about research finding may be more likely to be false than true. Scientific studies are tainted by poor study design, sloppy and often self-serving data analysis, and miscalculation – problems that replication of the studies and duplication of the results would largely correct. Again, the problem is that it’s not done. The continuing work of John Ioannidis at Stanford University, Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia, and others shows that much research is not and cannot be replicated. Almost a decade ago in these pages ( Courts Have No Business Doing Research Studies , Made2Measure, October 15, 2007), I highlighted a 2005 paper by Ioannidis titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” that...

The design of international development is ill-suited for our fast-paced world. It is not unusual for aid programs to take five or more years from blueprint to start-up and another five years for results to be reported, and even more time for the results to be “translated” into policy.   How Scientists Should Act Writing in the February 10, 2017 issue of Science , Erik Stockstad summarizes the message of Paul Cairney, a political scientist at the University of Stirling in the UK, author of the book, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making . Cairney’s message is for those scientists who want their findings to find their way into policy: Data does not speak for itself.   Scientists should be “sifters, synthesizers, and analyzers” to make the evidence “speak.” Cairney repeats the common refrain of policy-makers: “I don’t have the time to consider all the information. How do I decide?” Policymaking is disorderly. Scientists need to dispense with the notion t...

In a January 23, 2017 post ( Right Use and Politics in Performance Measurement and Management ), I argued that practitioners of performance measurement and management (PMM) must not ignore the reality of politics if they want to ensure the “right use” of PMM. They do so at peril of coming into the cross-hairs of foes who would “shoot the messenger” rather than consider data that they don’t like. The lesson that performance measurement data is not above politics came into full international view today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal article today written by Marcus Walker under the title Greeks Make Data The Enemy: Facing resurgent debt crisis, politicians indulge in conspiracy theories involving former   statistics chief . Andreas Georgiou, an American-trained economist and Greek citizen who moved from the U.S. and became Greece’s first independent head of statistics in 2010, stands accused by his foes of manipulating the country’s deficit figures in a plot t...

On September 25, 2015, the United Nation’s General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially known as “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The 2030 Agenda was hailed by then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as nothing less than “a defining moment in human history.”   Many critics, on the other hand, argued that the details of the SDGs – not necessarily their grand ambitions - do not bear close scrutiny. Leading up to the adoption of the SDGs, the prolonged debate about the goals the world set for 2030 had been heated, fraught with seemingly endless consultations. Nonetheless, in a surprise to many if not most informed observers, the sprawling package of SDGs, including 17 overarching goals and a mind-boggling 169 associated targets, was adopted virtually unchanged from that proposed on August 12, 2014, by the Open Working Group of the UN General Assembly on SDGs. The SDGs Are Not SMART In an article in the c...

In previous posts here (see Ensuring the Right Use of Performance Data: A Cautionary Tale from Health Care , June 26, 2012) and other writings, I have urged the broadening of the scope of inquiry about performance measurement and management (PMM) beyond the “right measures” and the “right delivery” of the information provided by the measures (for example, by such mechanisms as real-time performance dashboards) to the politics of the “right use” of that information. Trained in the social sciences, scholars and practitioners of PMM may think they can exclude politics from their models, thinking that it sullies the discipline of PMM or that politics is the business of other fields. This is a mistake, especially for international development. The necessity of consideration of politics is argued, among many international scholars, by Francis Fukuyama in the first chapter of his   2011 book, The Origins of Political Order. The requirements of the “right use” recognizes that PMM – ...

Incentive: The Missing Ingredient in Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) in Courts Woody Allen is said to have once quipped: “I was in a warm bed and, all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of your strategic plan.” What will it take for courts and other justice institutions to get out of their warm beds and embrace performance measurement and management (PMM)? What are the incentives? Business Incentives Do Not (Yet) Exist for Courts For private sector organizations, PMM is an imperative, an essential business evaluation tool that is a matter of survival. In the long-term, if profits are insufficient to cover expenses they surely soon will be out of business. In the short-term, if cash-flow does not cover employee salaries, they will close their doors sooner. Other than net profit and cash-flow, critical measures for businesses include return on investment, market share, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and employee engagement. For businesses moving the ne...

Advancing Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) in the Justice Sector Who else is doing PMM where? How is it working out for them? Answering these two questions will advance performance measurement and management initiatives more than any effort to date. For many years, I’ve been in the business of convincing courts and other justice institutions to develop political will and capacity (OK, mostly just trying ) to measure and manage their performance in an effective, accountable, and transparent manner. I used to think that widespread buy-in by the justice sector surely would be seen by the time of the development of well-conceived models beginning with the Trial Court Performance Standards in the late 1980s and early 1990s , to the CourtTools ten years ago , to the Global Measures of Court Performance in the last few years . But buy-in for PMM certainly has not been overwhelming. Instead, at best, it has been a slow slog for advocates of PMM. Who Else is Doing PMM...

Several weeks ago on September 25, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), 17 goals and 169 associated targets, thereby setting a new global agenda for the next fifteen years. On the one hand, the SDGs agenda promises to engage the whole world community, not only governments but also multinational companies, philanthropic foundations, civil society, scientists, non-government organizations, scientists, scholars and students around the world.   The new agenda was hailed by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as “a defining moment in human history.” On the other hand, critics claim that the SDGs are unmeasurable and unmanageable. The more limited “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs), which will expire at the end of this year, applied largely to poor countries and involved rich ones mostly as donors. The SDGs are broader and go much further than the MDGs; the latter are meant to be universally applicable to developing and developed countrie...

Around the world, the misuse of pretrial detention, the time period defendants are incarcerated between arrest and trial) is massive. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the overuse of pretrial detention, most of it arbitrary and excessive, has reached “crushing proportions.” Of the 1,000 inmates in Nigeria’s Kiriki Maximum Security Prison, a total of 639 have not been convicted and are awaiting trial. Kayode Yukubu is among them. He was arrested in 2003.   After twelve years as Kiriki’s longest-serving inmate, no court trial date has yet been set for him.   He is among approximately 70 percent of Nigeria’s 56,785 pre-trial detainees who have not been sentenced, many of whom already have spent far longer time behind bars than the maximum period of the sentence for their alleged crimes. (Pretrial detention is intended to ensure an accused person will appear in court or pose a danger to others, not to punish or rehabilitate.) The Economist spotlighted Nigeria’s pr...