Legislative Strengthening
Legis specializes in offering multi-year institutional strengthening programs.
Legis tailors interventions to build upon an institution’s existing strengths and address its unique challenges. We begin the needs assessment process with our unique institution mapping and assessment system to identify repetitive patterns of behavior that undermine institutional fairness, effectiveness and efficacy. Working with in-country partners, we then explore the causes of implementation problems and devise an institutional-strengthening program that targets the causes of the identified problems. This system is, in essence, an application of our Legislative Method of Participatory Problem Solving on an institutional basis.
Our legislative strengthening programs address key areas:
Issue Identification + Prioritization: When a problem is incorrectly described, proposed solutions are unlikely to work. The majority of laws, policies and programs that fail do so because they are based on an inaccurate understanding of the nature of the problem they are trying to solve. Transparent, participatory processes can also prove invaluable in fact gathering. Legis’s approach to describing problems and mapping political, economic, cultural, social, and administrative systems combines ethnographic and participatory methodologies with data analytics.
Legis’ core team includes individuals who have worked as ethnographers, taught social scientific and legal research methodologies at the university level, and taught systems mapping to parliamentary staffs and political party leaders, and completed political-economic systems mapping and organizational assessments pursuant to USAID and cooperating country funding.
Legislation Assessment + Law Reform: The primary purpose of a legislation assessment is to determine whether the enactment and implementation of a draft law will solve an identified social, economic, or environmental problem — or whether an existing law has done so. Legis’ courses, learning aids and implementation tools use the Legislative Method of Participatory Problem Solving as a guide to assessing (1) whether a legislative proposal addresses an actual problem, and (2) whether passage of the legislative proposal would resolve that problem.
Legislative Analysis + Process Design: Research shows that states with multiple strong, independent, policy development and drafting institutions that share information with one another and follow harmonized policy-making processes develop and promulgate more effective laws than do states that relegate the policymaking function to one branch of government. We promote transformative policy-making by (1) providing fora within which members of parallel decision-making processes can come together to exchange ideas and expertise, and (2) harmonizing decision-making processes, so those wishing to participate in the decision-making processes can predict which inputs the decision-making body will consider and when different forms of inputs will prove most relevant to the process.
Legislation Design + Drafting: Our current courses on legislative drafting reflect over15 years of experience in training law students, civil servants, parliamentary staff members, and civil society activists to draft legislation, as well as 10 years of research into drafting methodologies and outcomes. We have also developed curricula on legislative drafting for parliamentary and civil service training academies on three continents.
Legis’s forthcoming manual focuses on institutional choice in legislative drafting, and helps drafters establish situationally appropriate systems for resolving disputes, monitoring implementation, progressively realizing legislative objectives, and systematizing the evidence-based reform of underperforming laws and programs. The legislative drafting manual will be linked to the LegisX decision support system to guide users through the process of designing and drafting situationally suitable legislative solutions with a high likelihood of effectively addressing complex problems and operating within rapidly evolving fact patterns.
Monitoring + Evaluation: Legis’ founders have 20+ years of overall monitoring and evaluation experience (specializing in conducting process and performance audits, facilitating multi-stakeholder processes aimed at identifying disparate impacts and the nature and causes of implementation problems, and using data to drive results-based institutional reform). They have been teaching strategies for legislatively establishing monitoring and evaluation systems internationally since 2006, and have facilitated the institutionalization of legislative impacts assessment processes in numerous countries.
Clearly identifying a legislative theory of change is essential to determining whether or not a law is helping address a problem. Our indicators aim to determine whether or not the nature, scope or severity of the problem is changing; the intervention is being implemented pursuant to the law, policies and procedures; the intervention is producing the desired results; the program is proceeding within budgetary parameters; and the benefits derived from the intervention justify the costs.