Viet Nam PAPI Report highlights opportunities for strengthening local governance
Edmund Malesky presented insights from the 2024 Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) during the annual report’s launch event.
While the Viet Nam 2024 Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) reveals encouraging progress across several dimensions of local governance, it also shows disparities in citizen satisfaction, with women, ethnic minorities, migrants and residents of rural and more remote areas consistently reporting lower levels of service.
PAPI, a flagship governance program initiated by the United Nations Development Programs (UNDP) in Vietnam in 2009, measures and benchmarks citizens’ experiences and perception on the performance and quality of policy implementation and services delivery of all 63 provincial governments in Vietnam.
The 16th edition of the PAPI report captures the voices of 18,894 randomly selected respondents across the country. The survey covers eight dimensions of local governance: participation at local levels; transparency in local decision-making; vertical accountability towards citizens; control of corruption in the public sector; public administrative procedures; public service delivery; environmental governance; and e-government.
Edmund Malesky, professor of political economy and director of the Duke Center for International Development, co-authored the 2024 PAPI report and presented findings from during a launch event on April 15.
In the “Citizens’ Perspective of Local Governments’ Responses to Climate-Related Risks in 2024” session, Malesky shared there is a growing sense of citizen vulnerability to climate change. Nearly 40% of citizens surveyed reported their homes were directly affected by one or more climate-linked disasters in 2024, a 6% jump from 2023. Climate shocks included Typhoon Yagi, heatwaves, floods, and droughts.
The rising public concern underscores the urgent need for strengthening disaster preparedness, investing in resilient infrastructure, and ensuring regionally tailored responses are critical to safeguarding communities and building long-term climate resilience.
Malesky also presented “Where to Seat New Provinces’ Administrative Centers? A Suggestion from 2024 PAPI Data.”
As Viet Nam transitions to a two-tier local government system and prepares for provincial mergers, the PAPI research team considered which of the capitals is possibly best suited for delivering governance and public services today.
The key issue that differentiates these district capitals is our measures of transparency and local decision making and control of corruption in the public sector, Malesky shared.
“We think it makes sense to look at historical governance when thinking about how you're going to deal with the merged provinces,” he added. “You can always learn from the best performing cities within a province, and this is an opportunity to generate that type of learning.”
The PAPI report is co-authored by Dỗ Thanh Huyền, policy analyst at UNDP Viet Nam; Paul Schuler, associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona; Đặng Hoàng Giang, deputy director of CECODES; and Trần Công Chính, deputy director of CECODES and lecturer at the Faculty of Development Economics at Viet Nam National University.