2008a). The scheme intended to monitor the implementation of projects to be funded by debt relief savings and evaluate their outcomes. The evaluation reports from the first two rounds of this process act as the basis for the data used in this paper.

The President created an ‘OPEN office’ with a Presidential mandate to track and report on the expenditure of the debt relief gains. Rather than set up a parallel organization to spend debt relief savings, as had been done elsewhere, OPEN was seen as an opportunity to “find out where the most significant barriers to public expenditure lay” (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2007a). Thus, it was decided to channel the funds through standard institutions of government: the ministries, departments, and agencies of the Federal Government. This enables us to use the OPEN evaluation as a window into the workings of Nigeria’s government.

As background, it is worth understanding a little about the context in which the OPEN initiative was started. In 1999, Nigeria transited to a democratic government under President Olusegun Obasanjo after more than a decade and a half of military dictatorship. The new administration inherited a huge external debt portfolio.<sup>33</sup> Partially motivated by the promise of debt relief, the newly-elected President began his second term aiming to strengthen Nigeria’s economic position. A fiscal rule was introduced to de-link public expenditures from volatility in oil-revenues, state institutions were privatized, and a number of sectors deregulated to encourage private sector participation. Based on the thrust of the government’s reform agenda, the Paris Club granted Nigeria debt relief of about US$18billion in September 2005. This translated to annual debt-service savings of roughly US$1billion, US$750 million of which would accrue to the Federal Government. The OPEN evaluation reports evaluate the effectiveness of the federal portion of these savings.

The President directed that debt relief expenditures go to “core projects and programs in the social sector” (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2007a). A comparison of the distribution of funds in the OPEN program with that in the Federal Government budget as a whole indicates that the sample is representative across sectors. The OPEN office helped direct funds to a relatively representative sample of the nation’s smallscale social-sector projects. All were supposed to take roughly 12 months to complete. This implies they are not representative of the entire budget, which includes much recurrent expenditure (salaries, materials and supplies, and so on) and the funding of large scale dams, oil refineries and so on. However, they are representative of social-sector capital expenditures.

In the survey of bureaucrats I use in this paper, I was not able to undertake a survey at the decentralized organization to which electrification projects can be delegated. I therefore have to exclude all electrification projects for this analysis.

I hand-coded the information from the 21,000 documents and project files that made up the monitoring and evaluation report of the OPEN initiative for 2006/7. This makes up the set of representative evaluations of Federal Government public projects on which I draw.

From this representative set, I defined a dummy variable that indicated whether a project was inherently national or multi-jurisdictional (across many states for example) in nature, or whether the majority of its benefits could be designated as accruing to a single constituency. The analysis in this paper focuses on projects in the latter case. A project was excluded if: (i) it contains components that require access to international policy inputs; (ii) it contains components that require engagement with stakeholders at the national or international level; or, (iii) the scope of the project crosses multiple constituencies.

An example of a project that was excluded is from the Ministry of Women Affairs. It was entered into the budget as ‘Development and production of 2000 copies of a National Gender Policy (NGP) and 2000

> 33Nigeria’s Debt Management Office estimated that the nation owed external creditors US$36billion at the end of 2004, which was roughly twice the value of annual government expenditures (Debt Management Office, 2005).

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