Reports - United Nations Development Programme

COUNTRY EVALUATION: ASSESSMENT OF DEVELOPMENT RESULTS – TURKEY
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underdeveloped constitute a major portion of the EU’s
annual expenditures. Creation of capacity to manage
these resources is therefore an essential prerequisite that
the UNDP is particularly well placed to address. The
UNDP should intensify its support to local institutions,
including, but not exclusively limiting itself to the City
Councils, in order to increase capacity to:
Plan and manage development
Manage local finances
Ensure adequate oversight and accountability
Automate essential functions and processes of local
Government
Strengthen local CSOs with a view to supplementing
the role of the Government in all of the above and
strengthening checks and balances
Once again, an explicit linkage needs to be made to
the development of policy at the national level and the
UNDP needs to bring to bear all of the instruments and
capacity available to it in this regard. This includes the
NHDRs and capacity available to it at the regional and
global levels (see Chapter 3, Section C).
(ii) Other Governance Programmes
Supported by the UNDP
Aside from the LA 21 Programme, its major governance
flagship, a number of other UNDP initiatives and
programmes can be loosely categorised under the heading
of governance and capacity building. They do not
together represent a comprehensive or well-structured
programme of support for governance reform and
capacity building, and some of these initiatives proved to
be dead-ends which either never got off the ground or
were prematurely terminated for various reasons. 39
Nonetheless, lessons can and should be learned from these
overall, less successful UNDP initiatives.
E-GOVERNANCE PROJECTS
Two projects have been implemented under this rubric:
TUR/02/001 – Communication Automation for the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (total approved budget
USD 500,000)
TUR//03/003 – the Yalova City E-Governance
Project (total approved budget USD 450,000)
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39. In addition to the activities reviewed below, two other potentially important
governance initiatives were started but not completed. First, a programme for
the reform of national public administration was developed up to the stage of
implementation, but never actually carried out because of problems with
government cost-sharing contributions. Second, the UNDP provided some
assistance with the setting up of a national ombudsman office, but this initiative
was also abandoned. The ADR mission was told that this was due to the fact that
with the EU accession agenda human rights matters became a principal issue
for EU-Turkish relations.
The project with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
which is one of the two principal counterparts of the
UNDP in Turkey, involved the establishment of a local
area network; upgrading of software systems to Microsoft
Office; creation of a system of electronic archiving, faxing
and correspondence management; and standardisation of
the system across both the Ministry in Ankara and its
representations around the world.
It appears that project implementation has progressed
well. However, it is difficult to ascertain the contribution
of the project with reference to the intended outcomes as
stipulated in the SRF as the project-level monitoring and
evaluation systems do not appear to be in place.
The Yalova E-Governance project on the other hand
was intended to automate budget and revenue
management and was closely linked to the UNDP’s LA
21 programme in the same area. However, as of January
2004 project start-up was delayed due to problems with
the assignment and management of Government cost
sharing under the project.
ADVISORY SUPPORT FOR ECONOMIC
RESTRUCTURING AND MANAGEMENT
During the height of Turkey’s financial crisis in 2001,
UNDP Headquarters was concerned that the UNDP
was not sufficiently involved and visible in helping to
address key macroeconomic and structural reform issues
through technical assistance and advisory support to the
key economic Ministry at the time, the Treasury.
Accordingly, the Resident Representative was instructed
to offer UNDP support to the Senior Treasury officials
and a mission of UNDP technical staff from its Bratislava
office was sent to Ankara in May 2002 to ascertain in
what areas the UNDP’s assistance might best be
deployed. The mission tentatively recommended four
areas for consideration: support for the banking
supervisory board, for the privatisation process, for
attracting foreign direct investment, and for social safety
net programmes.
As it turned out, the UNDP’s initiative did not catch
the attention of the Government because during the
height of the crisis of 2001/2002 senior Treasury officials
were too preoccupied in managing the crisis and working
with their principal financiers and advisers, especially the
IMF and the WB. With the election of a new
Government in November 2002 and the handover from
one Resident Representative to another at the UNDP in
the spring of 2003, the initiative did not progress
substantially. However, during the course of 2003,
UNDP Country Office staff continued to formulate a