Building on Capacity Day 2007 (Washington DC, April 2007) that brought together leading international development thinkers, practitioners, partners and government leaders from around the world to raise the level of dialogue on the importance of good leadership, the World Bank Institute has now convened a working group of partners to launch a Global Leadership Initiative.

The objectives of the initiative are to elevate the profile of leadership development work globally, to increase the impact of leadership development activities in general, to improve the availability of resources to support such activities, and to expand networking opportunities for practitioners and leaders.

The working group of development partners have met on two successive occasions since April 2007 – with the objective: to consult and consolidate a shared vision on the value of the Global Leadership Initiative (GLI) and to design an initial work program to underpin it. As a next step, the GLI will undertake an initial research project. This will lead to the publication of a set of case studies on past and present capacity development interventions targeting high-level strategic leadership.

The World Bank Institute (WBI) will lead the research project, to examine how donor partners and others have designed and delivered leadership development services aimed at supporting existing leaders in their efforts to drive change and achieve results, including the implementation of policies for achieving specific development outcomes. The research goal of the study is to provide rigorous evidence and observations on the types of approaches that are being used to support political leadership and its relationship to the organizational/operational levels of government and to civil society in pursuit of development outcomes. The study will target the political and operational interface at national, sub-national, and local levels. This will include an examination of what works, what does not work and why, and lessons from select past and on-going leadership development services in a number of different countries. The cases will identify successful interventions drawn from a range of difficult political and governance contexts, including (i) conflict/post-conflict countries; (ii) newly installed government/administrations; and (iii) countries undertaking reform programs involving profound change, (e.g., major decentralization efforts). The study will be conducted in two phases.
Phase one will focus on identifying lessons from the application of leadership development approaches and methodologies with the ultimate aim of improving the practice area. The expected output of this phase is a review of sixty cases describing discrete projects or episodes, where leadership development support has made a difference to achieving development outcomes, along with a distillation of lessons and good practice. The leadership development approaches under review will go beyond client training in leadership to examine institutional/organizational initiatives, including Transformational Leadership initiatives, large-scale change management initiatives, and the use of leadership development interventions as a tool for public sector reform, and more limited problem solving and results-focused interventions. This will include examples of public-private sector and civil society collaboration which have successfully brought leaders and multi-sector stakeholders together to solve common problems and contribute to public goods, but not cases that deal solely with private sector initiatives.

With this call for cases, WBI hopes to identify case studies and good practice notes already documented by the World Bank, UNDP, CIDA and DFID, as well as from researchers and practitioners of leadership development services worldwide.

Phase two seeks to provide an in-depth examination and analysis of a subset of country cases focused on broader systemic impact, examining interventions that have contributed to a permanent shift in the culture of leadership and results. From the broad set of examples amassed in phase one, six cases will be further developed to delve into the political economy, country context, and the interface between leadership development and successful outcomes among political, operational, and civil society actors. These cases will seek answers to questions such as, what sustainable institutional changes have resulted from the use of Leadership Development approaches? What impact has this had on the basic system of incentives, and the policy environment? How have these changes influenced organizations in terms of the allocation or utilization of resources?

The target audience for the published cases will include government leadership teams, practitioners and researchers of leadership development services, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies.

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