Governance Practices in Poverty Alleviation Projects: Case Study from Stewardship-Driven Perspective and Sustainability Context

Abstract

The successful planning and implementation of poverty alleviation projects are crucial for establishing optimum benefits to its intended target groups in line with the Sustainable Development Goals charted by the United Nations. This chapter focuses on exploring the project governance practices in poverty alleviation projects from public officials' perspective through the lens of stewardship theory. Project governance is a framework and functions to guide project management activities to meet organisational strategic and operational goals, leading to project success. By investigating three (3) public poverty alleviation projects in Malaysia, it is discovered that project governance is practised and positively interplayed with several project governance elements throughout the project planning and implementation. Several insights and rationales of the decision-making process from the sustainability contexts are also explored where the target groups should be allowed to participate in decision making in the front-end of the project, while lessons learnt from previous projects are invaluable input that should be compiled and documented for future references. Although the fragmented nature of public projects is considered a point of weakness, project delivery success could be achieved by utilising project governance practices applicable in public poverty alleviation projects.

Evaluation of Urban Flood Governance Efficiency Based on the Data Envelopment Analysis Model and Malmquist Index: Evidence from 30 Provincial Capitals in China

“…The evaluation of government governance efficiency serves as a crucial driver for establishing governance systems and modernizing governance capabilities. Currently, governance efficiency evaluation studies mainly focus on government departments, not only in terms of evaluating their overall governance efficiency [27] but also with respect to exploring the governance efficiency, constraints, and improvement strategies of each department considering specific aspects such as air pollution [28][29][30], regional ecological environment [31,32], rural livelihoods [33][34][35], and poverty [36][37][38].…”