STAGE 4: Implementation
Lay the groundwork for a massive formalization campaign and its Implementation. Other Information:
The reforms must also lay the groundwork for a massive formalization campaign and its Implementation. Resistance to reform
from vested interests is likely, and the best way to overcome such opposition is to establish local ownership of the reform
process and thus sustain it over time. The ILD typically recommends that the Government create a new, independent institutional
arrangement for implementing the reforms. But experience has taught us that there is a need to be flexible at this crucial
stage of the Reform Program; various arrangements are available to the client country, depending on existing institutions,
on-going reform initiatives, funding, and human resources. The client country might choose to create one single institutional
vehicle responsible for the day-to-day tasks of implementing the reforms. Among these tasks are included recruiting and training
personnel, setting up offices, building a public consensus that the reforms will benefit all sectors of society and establishing
feedback mechanisms that will monitor the progress of the reformed legal system. The client might also choose to create a
new national database that will pull together the nation’s dispersed record-keeping and registration processes. Another alternative
would be a decentralized system of agencies that would be assigned these various implementation tasks –engineered and managed
in a way that they could all work effectively and harmoniously. IMPLEMENTATION MECHANISMS A Field Xoperation Program to establish
procedures, recruits and train personnel, and equip offices to recognize and process individual property rights in the extralegal
sector. A consensus Building Program to demonstrate publicly –through the media– the benefits of formalization to any group
inclined to support the status quo (e.g. the business community, the bureaucracy, even the extralegal sector). A Feedback
Mechanism to ensure continually that the rule of law stays in touch with the needs of the poor and that any new legislation
or government regulations are in sync with the property system. A national Database that will pull together the nation’s dispersed
record keeping and registration processes with all the economically useful descriptions of legal and extralegal assets into
one easily accessible location. For anyone committed to the legal empowerment of the poor –whether a politician or scholar/practitioner
of development like us– the most exciting stage on the ILD bridge is likely to be Implementation. Reform, after all, is a
result-oriented endeavor, and it is here in the Implementation Stage where the first results of all previous efforts can be
seen; here, too, is the groundwork for the future. It is during the Implementation where the challenges of the fight against
poverty reap genuine rewards. While researching and analyzing the inner-workings of both legal and extralegal economies is
a boots-on-the-ground technical and methodological exercise, balancing the various interests and agendas of different stakeholders
and shifting policy moods is an art. Stage Four has the virtue of helping client countries match their vision of strong institutional
foundations with their actual agenda of institutional policy reform. It is only through such a match that Implementation is
possible and the promise of sustainability can be meaningful. By its nature, Implementation depends, explicitly or implicitly,
on the previous stages of the “Legal Empowerment Implementation Program”. The ILD can assist a client country at this late
stage –as long as we can quickly grasp the nuts and bolts of implementing the institutional changes it has already designed.
Implementation is about executing strategically down to earth legal solutions that consider the poor as part of the solution
rather than the problem.
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