Participation by invitation only

Niti Foundation and Nepal Administrative Staff College (NASC) are jointly organizing a seminar on Public Policy Management. Within the changing socio-political context of the Nepali state, there is increasing pressure on the bureaucracy to enable an effective democratic public policy management regime. Remaining within structural and procedural reforms in the bureaucracy for public policy management, the objective of this seminar is to bring together key stakeholders from the government, civil society and academia to explore the context and challenges of instituting a broader policy management framework within the government as the first step towards initiating public policy process reform. The scope of deliberation of this policy seminar will encompass the following key themes:

1. Role and responsibilities of public institutions (Ministries of Government of Nepal) in managing public policy functions
2. Contextualizing public policy management – exploring current bureaucratic capacity, trend and challenges in managing public policies
3. Diagnosis of public policy process in Nepal reform
4. Building capacity for public policy management – course on public policy

Location: Hotel Annapurna, Durbar Marg

Time: 8:30am – 1:00pm

Participation by invitation only

Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) was established in 1985 under Nepal Electricity Authority Act 1984 to overcome overlapping and duplication of works previously carried out by Department of Electricity within Ministry of Water Resources, Nepal Electricity Corporation and related Development Boards. It remained as a sole authority to manage electricity for several years, and even after introduction of private sector in generation of electricity in 1992 and local communities in distribution of electricity in 2005, NEA is still a major organization to generate, transmit and distribute electricity in Nepal. However, with the current increase in the demand of electricity and the inability of NEA to expand access to electricity and to provide adequate electricity to the citizens, the capacity of NEA to address current energy needs by itself and in coordination with the private sector and community organizations has been questioned. This discussion will bring together current and former Managing Directors of NEA to discuss problems within NEA and its potential role in addressing the current energy crisis. This event will provide useful insights for recent on-going discussions on NEA’s reform.

The study also finds that weak citizen participation, ineffective policy implementation, and lack of accountability of public officials as three key factors behind failure of public policies in Nepal. Niti Foundation believes that the issues of representation, implementation, and accountability will remain policy challenges and hence has decided to concentrate its effort on these issues.

Policy making in a democracy must fulfill three key functions:

1. Representation: citizens must have a way to make their problems and needs known to government officials, and a way to make demands on officials to use government to address their problems.
2. Implementation: once public officials pass laws and regulations, there must be systems for putting these policies into practice, or to put it another way, for translating words on paper into human actions.
3. Accountability: there must be mechanisms by which officials are monitored, evaluated, and sanctioned when they have not met their responsibilities to carry out policy.

NITI PRODUCT II: Download