Palladium strengthens national and sub-national government institutions to deliver better public services to citizens in an inclusive and accountable manner.

Our work includes:

• improving the policy and regulatory environment;
• public financial management;
• strengthening administrative systems; and
• promoting transparent and accountable governance processes and capacity, including taking social services closer to the people

We help create fairer societies by working with governments to engage with and support marginalised groups, including the very poor, orphans, vulnerable children, the elderly, minorities, and the disabled.

Accountable, responsible, and accessible state institutions need to be complemented by empowered citizens who can make their voices heard in governance processes. They should be able to influence decision making that affects their daily lives and hold policy makers and service providers to account. Palladium believes the reform of government and public institutions must be complemented by empowering citizens to influence the decisions that affect their lives in spheres such as health, education, the environment, economic infrastructure, etc. We partner with civil society, community-based organisations, the media, and others, both individually and via collective action initiatives, to support improved services for citizens and protection of their rights. We apply innovative facilitation and knowledge building approaches that empower local actors.

Corruption is one of the greatest obstacles to economic and social development. The harmful effects of corruption are especially severe on the poor. Palladium supports governments, the private sector, and non-state actors to develop the systems and skills to address corruption and foster transparency. We apply evidence-driven approaches, such as applied political economy analysis and institutional systems reviews, to measure and diagnose governance issues and drivers of corruption that most constrains the private sector and service delivery. The tactics we utilise address the five key elements of an effective anti-corruption strategy:

1. Increasing political accountability
2. Strengthening civil society participation
3. Creating private sector engagement
4. Implementing effective institutional restraints on power
5. Improving public sector management

Over the past decade, Palladium has been at the forefront of applying a political economy approach to delivering development results. We were among the pioneers of applied political economy analysis (PEA), conducting some of the first drivers of change and political economy studies commissioned by donors. Our in-house team of political economy experts has since conducted dozens of macro and sectoral PEAs across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Eastern Europe.

Palladium has also been a pioneer of politically smart and adaptive programming, putting principles such as ‘thinking and working politically,’ ‘doing development differently,’ and ‘problem-driven iterative adaptation’ (PDIA) into practice.

In recent years, our programs have developed strategies, tools, and decision-making processes as well as research, monitoring, and learning systems to ensure that governance programming is flexible, adaptive, effective, and grounded in political realities.

We leverage our deep technical expertise in a range of sectors, including health; environmental and natural resources; food security; economic growth; education; and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) to improve service delivery through improved governance. We work to convene multiple stakeholders from the public and private sectors and civil society to find solutions to service delivery issues that ensure citizens’ demands and needs are heard and met.

Palladium works with partners to ensure politically conducive settings for inclusive development and to enable citizens’ voices in change processes. We recognise that democratic institutions are not only created through formal arrangements, and we seek to understand the informal constraints and opportunities in local institutions that affect democratic governance outcomes. We engage local dynamics such as patronage, corruption, and collective action to reduce obstacles to development goals.

Palladium draws on a global team of gender and social inclusion (GESI) experts to lead innovative community approaches across all sectors. Through GESI, we develop and implement broad, comprehensive strategies to address socioeconomic inequities in culturally sensitive ways. Through project leadership and implementation, research and analysis, we maintain a repository of global best practices on gender integration and adapt our tools to local context for improved advocacy and decision making. We provide technical assistance to policymakers, governments, and interagency groups to ensure that gender issues are integrated into policies, programs, national budgets and evaluations.

We engage a range of stakeholders in our social inclusion and capacity development approaches, including women, youth, and indigenous populations as well as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. These leaders then become effective policy advocates, promoting community-level social and behaviour change. We also work to promote attitudinal and social behaviour change to help create sustainable enabling environments for excluded groups, and to combat issues such as gender-based violence.