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Results for court reform (europe and latin america)

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Author: Decker, Klaus

Title: Improving the Performance of Justice Institutions: Recent Experiences from Selected OECD Countries Relevant for Latin America

Summary: Justice sector institutions across the world face the challenge of delivering better services to those seeking justice. The courts in a number of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have undergone large scale reform programs incorporating both performance-based approaches of New Public Management (NPM), as well as private sector practices. Terms such as client satisfaction, cost-benefit analysis, total quality management and performance evaluation, which originated in the private sector, are now increasingly applied to justice institutions in more advanced OECD countries-- and other countries beginning to follow suit. For almost two decades, justice authorities in OECD countries have been trying to improve the performance of their courts. Some have had more success than others. The wealth of experience that has been generated about how (and how not) to approach court performance can be shared with others for cross-country learning. In recent years, the focus of reforms has increasingly shifted from approaches focusing on narrow quantitative efficiency to those focusing on managing quality. Radical changes have also taken place in the organizational cultures of justice institutions in order to steer them towards providing better services for the citizens and society as a whole. Justice reformers in Latin America should not be surprised to find that some OECD countries are still struggling to respond to the same issues they face. Justice institutions generally have a complex setup in which the dysfunctions of a single agency can generate externalities that quickly impact the performance of other agencies, with the latter having little or no ability to correct those externalities. However, in designing their own solutions, Latin American reformers may find the experience of OECD countries which are facing similar challenges to be a useful reference. In the same way that legal reforms cannot simply be transplanted from one country into another, any lessons learned from OECD countries should be carefully adapted to the particularities of Latin American justice institutions which have a different history and reflect different social and economic contexts. Perhaps the most important lessons to be learned from OECD countries are those that may help avoid generating unmanageable expectations or raising the bar too high. This paper presents a selection of experiences from OECD countries in managing justice institutions which are the most relevant for performance improvement of their counterparts in Latin America. The scope of the paper is mostly limited to the courts, but comprises all types of courts: specialized courts as well as courts of general jurisdiction, civil as well as criminal and administrative courts, first instance as well as appellate and supreme courts. Issues of legal reform, judicial training, alternative dispute resolution or access for the poor are not considered in this paper.

Details: Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2011. 146p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 29, 2011 at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTECA/Resources/librojusticiaING-cian.pdf

Year: 2011

Country: International

URL: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTECA/Resources/librojusticiaING-cian.pdf

Shelf Number: 121950

Keywords:
Court Reform (Europe and Latin America)
Courts
Criminal Justice Reform