 Hello, my name is Bob Warner. I'm from the Crawford School of Public Policy, and I work on the school's new journal, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, and also with its Associated Society, Asia and the Pacific Policy Society. This is a multi-disciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal that tries to generate policy debate and make contributions to policy throughout the Asia and the Pacific region. A little bit earlier today, we were really fortunate to have Haro Akunya giving a presentation about some work that he's been doing in Vietnam over the last five or six years, examining citizens' perceptions of the governance and administration performance of provincial governments in Vietnam. Haro, welcome to the Crawford School. Thank you very much, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here. And we're really pleased that you're able to come and give a presentation this afternoon and also to talk to us now. And first of all, it'd be interesting if you could give us some introduction to this index that you've been working on, which I understand has taken up quite a bit of your time over the last few years. Sure. I mean, basically what we are trying to do, Bob, is to, as you mentioned in the introduction, try to understand what are Vietnamese citizens' experiences when they interact with local authorities. The index itself is called the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index, quite a long name, I know. But it basically is a pioneering tool in the country that asks ordinary citizens how are their interactions with the local authorities. For example, if they have to apply for a land use rights certificate, how was that experience? If they have children in school, what are the levels of satisfaction that they have with the public primary schools? If a relative falls sick and has to go to the district public hospital, what are the experiences of that healthcare system? And we are trying to collect all that information evenly across all 63 provinces in the country. 63 provinces. That's quite a big task, isn't it? Can I ask why you focus that assessment on provincial, local governments? Yeah. Well, basically, what I think that we have come to the conclusion is that, you know, is at the local levels where the Vietnamese citizens have the closest interactions with the authorities. In the case of Vietnam, even though it's a one-party centralized political system, there is, you know, an unofficial informal decentralization and provision of public services happening. As you know, Vietnam is a very long country, right? More than 3,000 kilometers from the north to the south. And, you know, all these 63 provinces provide a wide range of different quality of services from the public sector. And Vietnam has 90 million citizens spread across 63 provinces. The average size of the province in Vietnam is around 2 million citizens, right? So a small unit. So, you know, what we are trying to do is, you know, to feedback that information back to the center to understand, you know, what are the issues of performance and, you know, on which provinces need to improve but also identify good practices, right? And then hopefully translate those good practices from one province to another one. Okay. Now, so I understand that the index measures performance across six key dimensions. Do you want to tell us a bit about those dimensions and why you thought they were important? Yeah. The six dimensions that we measure are dimensions that relate to the Vietnamese own rules and regulations, right? So it's an index that is indogenous to the governance aspects of the country. And they are not based on predetermined conceptions of what is good governance of what is public administration. Even though the names of those dimensions are very much standard, right? Participation dimension number one. Dimension number two is about transparency. And number three, vertical accountability for control of corruption, both in the public service but also in the public administrative areas. Fifth, public administrative procedures and dimension number six is about public service delivery. So in total is six dimensions. Each dimension has three or four subdimensions. Each subdimension has three or four different indicators. So at the end of the day, Papi itself is an aggregation of six dimensions, 22 subdimensions, 92 different indicators. So it gives you a wide array of different aspects of service delivery. Okay. And what kind of results? You've been running the survey now for five years? We have been doing this since 2009, where we started as a small pilot, right? Initially, you know, there was a lot of questions, you know, in terms of how an exercise like this, you know, can be implemented in the country. So we tried to follow the very Vietnamese way of piloting things in small scale, right? And then scale up and replicate, innovate to other provinces. So we started in 2009 with three provinces to test the methodology, to test the questions, right? And the issues, you know, that could be asked. Based on the results, there was a decision made that we were going to expand it, but not to all 63 provinces, but to half of the country, 30. So in 2010, we replicated, we improved the methodology. From 2011 onwards, you know, it has been done systematically close to all 63 provinces on a yearly basis. So it's an annual monitoring tool. In terms of the results, what the information is telling us is identified with some level of precision. First of all, which provinces are doing better in each one of these sub-dimensions, not only, you know, the dimension aspects, but also by exploring the data itself, trying to determine what makes a Vietnamese citizen to say, yes, I'm satisfied with a particular service or with a particular procedure. And then use that information to go back to the provincial government and design strategies for them, you know, to improve that performance. So it's not just a scorecard. You actually are interrogating the dimensions or the drivers of satisfaction. So you're actually able to go back to provincial authorities or other people who are interested and say, this is what the people are telling us, the reasons why they are or are not satisfied. Yes, absolutely. I mean, the the the visible objective of the exercise is the scorecard, right, to say this province is doing better than these other provinces. But also, you know, when you have 63 provinces with so diverse characteristics in terms of wealth, in terms of population, in terms of levels of urbanization, right, it doesn't make much sense, you know, to compare, you know, promise number one with promise number 23 or promise number 64, right. But, you know, try to understand, you know, what are the dynamics, right, in those provinces? One of the things that we that we seem to be noticing from that, from that from that exercise of extrapolating that data, Bob, is that that we can challenge conventional wisdom in the country about service delivery from from the public sector. And let me just give you a very quick example, right, the traditional wisdom will tell that the quality of the service will vary according to the province where you are performing that service, right. So, if you are in this province, you are bound to have a better service than these other province, right. And we wanted to, to, to, you know, to understand that hypothesis. And we looked at the data. And what we found is that 73% of the variation of the experiences by the ordinary citizens is by the individual characteristics of the respondent, not necessarily the location, right. So it, things like, for example, men experience better governance than women. Keen citizens, which is the majority of, of, of ethnicity experience substantial better services than ethnic minority groups, the profession or the wealthy also tend to have more positive experiences. Right. So that, you know, that says a lot in terms of, you know, providing clues to the authorities that, you know, there's not a fatalistic, right, vision that, you know, according to this province, you know, you are doomed to have a poor quality of services, right. Try to understand those dynamics and, you know, tweak all, you know, the, the, the police implementation aspects. So geography is not necessarily destiny? I, yeah, I don't think so, right. And also, yeah, I mean, and, and, and not necessarily rich provinces do better, right. And one thing that, you know, also Papi is pioneering in Vietnam is the mapping aspects of governance. You know, as I mentioned in the, in the, in the lecture, but one traditionally sees maps of Vietnam of, you know, poverty levels, vulnerability to climate change, but not about governance, right. And thanks to, you know, to, to, to, to this scorecard type of exercise, we can map which provinces, you know, are doing better than others. And what we can find very quickly, right, is that is, is, is the poor provinces that are outperforming the richer provinces, right, in terms of overall governance satisfaction. It might be very well, you know, because of, of, you know, of levels of expectations that citizens have, right, in, in, in richer, more educated provinces. But, you know, it's, it's, it's also challenging the modernization theory type of approach, right, that, you know, you will have good governance or good service delivery once you have reached certain thresholds of, of wealth, right. Do you have any tentative explanations of why you've overthrown the conventional wisdom? Are there any reasons why you do get that, that disparity? Well, I think that what has happened is that that conventional wisdom was never really tested empirically, right. And it was all based on, you know, traditional low income type of policymaking processes, right. And now Vietnam has made this transition to middle income country. And with that, you know, more data and more evidence, you know, is being put into, into into the table of discussion on policies. So I think that that's why, you know, all these traditional wisdom were, were seen as meta-complete, so to speak, right. Everybody assumed them, but it was, they were never really empirically proved or, you know, disaggregated, analyzed, right. And I also think, Bob, you know, that we are at the infancy, right, you know, we are only started, you know, this exercise, even though something that I should have mentioned earlier, right, is the largest governance survey that we have in the country. Over these five, past five years, we have interviewed nearly 50,000 Vietnamese citizens, right. Every year, since we started nationwide implementation, we collect almost 14,000 responses. So we have a wealth of data that, you know, that needs to be explored, needs, you know, needs to be analyzed, you know, with that, with that lens of the transition from low income, policymaking, lack of evidence, development stage to a middle income or low middle income in which evidence-based policymaking, you know, is becoming more important, you know. And why is that, right? In middle income, Vietnamese citizens are more educated, are healthier, right, are wealthier than a generation ago. They're also looking for a different type of provision of public services, right. And PAPI helps in that regard, you know, to put that information open for discussion. Okay. So it's one thing to have a tool that monitors and provides a measure of performance, but the real test of anything like that is how it's used, you know, to actually impact on how things might change. Can you tell us a little bit how PAPI interacts with the way in which the government and other people try and change things? Yeah. Well, I think that for that, we have three levels of analysis on how the information is used. And, you know, to our surprise, you know, we have had a very good, open reception, you know, to this type of data, especially when you iterate, right, the exercise on an on an on an annual basis. The first level is at the national level, right? How did the authorities in Hanoi, you know, using the information, the government inspect rate, that is in charge of the administrative oversight functions, they have to report every year to the National Assembly, they use our data to report on the issue of corruption, for example. The Ministry of Home Affairs, right, also has been using, you know, our methodology to design their own public administration reform index monitoring system. We have had extensive discussions with the Ministry of Justice on their administrative procedure control agency that tries to understand, you know, all these issues of, of, so this is the first level, right at the central level. And then we see that there are some, you know, significant use for policymakers. Second level is at the provincial level, right? At the end of the day, this is a provincial exercise, right? And we want provinces to start using that. Initially, the first the first year, not much use. So to speak, I think that, you know, there was some some sort of resistance from from from the authorities, and also lack of awareness of knowledge, right? But over the year, we have more and more provinces looking at the data, analyzing informally first. But the last count that we did two weeks ago is that approximately 13 provinces have officially issued some sort of response to the results for their province. Either an action plan, a decision or an instruction from the provincial people's committee or from the provincial people's councils, saying we have looked at the data, we have analyzed the results. Here are the weaknesses coming from this data. And here are the steps that we are going to do to improve the performance. And that's the second level. The third level, Bob, is the the academic community and the research community, right? This data is made publicly available for free, right? And we think that this is a goldmine for research. Media has been reporting using that information to to to write stories about governance and public administration. Academics from within Vietnam, but also from from outside of Vietnam, you know, have looked at the data and I have published peer review articles using, you know, this information, right? So, you know, within that, you know, we, we have, we have managed to, you know, over time, to increase, you know, the use and the impact of this type of information. Okay, at the outset, when you were describing the the project, you may reference the fact that Vietnam is a single party state. And I think many people will be surprised that a single party state would not only allow but embrace a process which is all about people offering criticisms of of how the state and the party are doing. Can you tell us a little bit why, why you think you've been successful in avoiding that trap? Well, you know, yes, of course, you know, Vietnam is a one party state, but that doesn't mean that they are not interested in providing good services, right? And, you know, making sure that the large majority of population, you know, has, you know, higher levels of satisfaction with with service delivery, right? And from that angle, I think that, you know, that's why the system has been receptive to these, to this exercise. But also the partners that we have, you know, I think that, you know, are important. We have partner, yes, it's true with a very small NGO, the called Secodes, the Center for Community Support and Development Studies, but in some sort of consortium format with the largest mass socio-political organization in the country, the Vietnam Fatherland Front, that has a representation from the Politburo Central Committee Provincial Level District Commune Village in the country, right? And it's through this partnership with the Fatherland Front that these exercises have been able to be implemented, you know, across the country. And yes, you know, I think that, you know, there is a genuine interest, right, to make sure that, you know, as Vietnam progresses economically, right, the benefits of that growth are also distributed equally in other aspects of governance and public administration. So, Hari, you said that people can access the information. Can you tell us where they go to to get the data from these five years of study? Yeah, that's correct. You know, we have created a website, which is the most traditional and easiest, you know, way to do that. The address is www.papi.vn. Okay, well, thank you very much for coming and talking to us today, and particularly for giving us this interview. It's my pleasure.