What will it take to achieve equal access to justice for all?
Get Serious About Global Metrics and Measuring Progress
By Clare Manuel and Marcus Manuel, Senior Research Fellows, ODI, London.
The Justice Action Coalition Ministerial meeting on 19 June is an opportunity to get to grips with what needs to change globally to achieve measurable progress in access to justice.
Achieving measurable progress will involve the justice sector developing global metrics of the type which have been fundamental to achieving vast improvements in access to other services such as health and education. The justice sector has decades of experience of global metrics from other service sectors to draw on.
About this series:
This is the third in a series of four blogs on financing justice by Clare Manuel and Marcus Manuel, Senior Research Associates at ODI. Throughout this series the authors address the question: “what will it take to achieve equal access to justice for all?” and draw on ODI’s pioneering research on justice financing: “Taking people-centred justice to scale: Investing in what works to deliver SDG 16.3 in lower-income countries,” supported by Pathfinders for peaceful, just and inclusive societies, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In the piece below, the authors consider the need for global data on basic justice metrics.
Global indicators
The Millennium Development Goals set in 2000 provided the focus for huge strides globally in improving access to services such as health, education, and clean water. The Goals prioritized front-line service delivery and focused attention on achieving outcomes at scale.
The inclusion of justice as a Sustainable Development Goal in 2015 was a major achievement. But developing, and then reporting on indicators to measure progress has proved challenging. The justice sector’s target 16.3 — to promote the rule of law at the national and international levels, and ensure equal access to justice for all — is not specific (for example about the kinds of justice it refers to, with no distinction between major and minor justice needs), nor is it quantified or time-bound. Compare this to the health sector’s target 3.7 — by 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services — measured by the percentage of women who report their need for family planning is satisfied with modern methods.
As with health and education, delivering measurable progress in access to justice requires the international community to be laser-focused on its commitment to deliver SDG16.3. To be used as a meaningful management tool, this needs to be underpinned with clarity about the precise level of ambition, and investment in tools to measure progress.
Global needs analysis
For the health sector, understanding what and where the priority problems were, was key to making global progress. The WHO’s Multi-Country Survey Study, developed in the light of the Millenium Development Goals, enabled the measurement of health parameters in a systematic, standardized, and cross-nationally comparable manner. There are now multiple examples of regular analyses of health needs. UNICEF, the WHO, the World Bank, and UN all work with national authorities to combine national census data with internationally funded globally standardized and targeted surveys such as country demographic and health surveys. Together these kinds of surveys provide granular details of needs — including by disease, outcome, and by sub-national units. Taken together they provide a rich data set which feeds into an understanding of what global health needs are — which is the starting point for addressing them.
The UN 2008 Legal Empowerment of the Poor report and the 2019 Justice for All report were seminal starting points for a global needs analysis in the justice sector. More granular information at the country level is becoming available through legal needs surveys. A key challenge: these kinds of surveys are expensive. The World Justice Project’s atlas of legal needs surveys reports only a few surveys for lower-income countries, which are likely to be the countries with greatest need and greatest gaps in knowledge about legal needs and justice problems. For a truly global approach to access to justice, more resources need to be provided for needs analysis, including in lower-income countries.
Global cost analysis
Cost analysis has long been standard in other sectors as the basis for enabling strategic decisions about where to prioritize resources and target funds to achieve maximum impact, as well as what kind of services to fund. The health sector’s approach to cost analysis has built up over 30 years, through a series of landmark studies starting with the 1993 World Development Report and including the World Health Organization’s 2001 Commission on Macroeconomics and Health report which costed primary health care, and the Taskforce on Innovative International Financing for Health System’s 2009 report.
In the justice sector, cost analysis is in its infancy. In contrast to other service sectors, it is striking that there has been very limited focus on the costs of justice services. Very few donor evaluations reviewed in previous and forthcoming ODI research considered the unit costs of the justice services they were funding. In researching front-line justice services in lower-income countries, many of the service providers ODI collaborated with were actually unaware of the unit costs of the services they provide.
The first attempt at a global cost analysis was ODI’s contribution to the Justice for All report, which identified benchmark unit costs for basic justice services across country income groups. ODI’s paper also provided unit cost benchmarks for front-line, community-based services that address justice problems (“cases”). The health sector uses a similar costing approach, based on the average unit cost of individual medical interventions (analogous to legal “cases”). ODI’s benchmarks were $20 a case in low-income countries, and $50 in lower middle-income countries. ODI’s latest research (soon to be published) draws on data from over 20 front-line justice service providers across 12 lower-income countries and shows that it is indeed possible to deliver front-line justice services at, or in some cases below, these cost benchmarks.
ODI’s pioneering research was exploratory. Because justice service providers and their funders do not focus on costs, accessing robust data proved extremely challenging. We hope our work will be the starting point for a global initiative to develop improved data sets on justice service costs, enabling deeper, more granular, and more robust analysis.
Global cost-benefit analysis
To build the case for more resources to be targeted on front-line justice services, it would be helpful to have deeper and more robust evidence of the impact of services, for example on improved human rights, health, and income. As with global cost analysis, the justice sector has much to learn from other sectors, especially health. Again, the knowledge gap is greatest in lower-income countries. It is these countries which present the greatest challenges in terms of data, particularly in estimating benefits. A key challenge is ensuring there is equity, as well as efficiency: a legal case with a low financial value will have high value to the person concerned, if it represents 100% their income. New approaches that measure wellbeing, developed in the health and other sectors, may also be useful when estimating the benefit of investing in justice.
As in the health sector, cost-effectiveness assessments will be needed in parallel with cost-benefit analyses.
Major investment is needed in basic justice metrics: on needs, costs, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefits
Measurable progress in access to access to justice will require the international community to make significant investments in basic global metrics, especially in lower-income countries where the data and knowledge gaps are greatest.
