Institutional and context analysis for the sustainable development goals. Guidance note.

The implementation of a given policy succeeds when key players have an incentive to make it succeed. When one or more of society’s key actors disagree with or are threatened by a certain policy, they have an incentive to make it fail. Understanding how different actors in society – civil servants, farmers, industrialists, incumbents, opposition parties, religious authorities, groups of men or women, and more – have differing incentives to enable or block interventions is key to successful policy implementation. All actors have distinct histories and – crucially – face constraints, such as institutional limits on their power, a weak resource base, or an inability to act collectively. This means that only some have the ability to act on an incentive. Illuminating this mixture of incentives and constraints is the aim of Institutional and Context Analysis (ICA) at the country level. UNDP first launched Institutional and Context Analysis (ICA) as an approach to support country-level programming in 2012, largely based on methodologies developed by the World Bank and DFID1 . Originally conceived to help UNDP staff take politics into account in their programming work, the main objective of the first analyses done based on the ICA methodology was to help development practitioners deliver on their commitments to national partners and donors to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, an ICA was primarily envisioned as an input to understanding how different actors in society, who are subject to an assortment of incentives and constraints, shaped the likelihood of programme success.