Sectorial planning

The process of sectorial planning of SAGARPA was analyzed through a documental review, in which the characteristics of the three sectorial programs covered in the period of 2001 to 2018 were identified, and the number of ministers in each of them was included. In addition, a semi-structured interview was carried out with three actors involved in the planning process. The design of the interview consisted in open questions that allowed the description of the process and the identification of the participating actors.

Design and approval of budgetary programs

The budgeting process is described considering as example the Integral Program for Rural Development (PIDR) 2014. For this purpose, the following was carried out:

Evaluation process

In this stage, the difficulty in evaluating programs that change name and objectives was made evident; for this purpose, a time line was designed where the evolution of the Programs oriented at Rural Development is shown (Programs for Productive Promotion, Support to Investment, and Technical Assistance), and it focuses on the changes of objectives and indicators of the programs of rural extension through the review of the SAGARPA operation rules and their RIM during the period 2001-2016.

Lastly, the evaluations of the programs linked to rural development contained in the system of “evaluation of social programs” of the National Council for Evaluation of the Social Development Policy (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social, CONEVAL) and external agencies in the period 2006-2016, are analyzed.

Sectorial planning

Within the framework of the Federal Public Administration (Administración Pública Federal, APF), the Political Constitution of the Mexican United States in Article 26a, and the Planning Law it is established that: “there must be a national development plan (NDP) to which all programs of the APF must be mandatorily subjected” (^{DOF, 1983}); thus, every six years, the executive power publishes its NDP. These plans in the last three six-year-periods have agreed in themes such as economic growth and stability; improvement of the livelihoods, educational quality, and democratic strengthening, making particular emphasis on themes such as compliance to the rule of law, security and peace (^{DOF, 2001a}; ^{DOF, 2007a}).

According to the Planning Law, the sectorial programs derived from the NDP must fulfill the same orienting function in the agencies responsible for each of them. The analysis carried out of the three last Sectorial Programs of SAGARPA showed that, in general terms, they are good planning exercises. The diagnoses are complete and accurate, and they address the importance of the sector in the global and national context, and the challenges it faces. The objectives and strategies are accurate and coherent and they are aligned for the fulfillment of the goals established in the corresponding NDP. In general terms the action lines are pertinent and they even incorporate explicit indicators and goals since the last two six-year-terms (Table 2).

However, it was also found that the Sectorial Plan from each six-year-term has only been a formality to comply with what is established in the current regulations (^{García, 2010}), and it does not orient the public policies of the sector because of the following reasons:

Therefore, agriculture and livestock sectorial planning does not have the capacity to generate government agenda. For these reasons, the programming and budgeting of the sectorial public policy does not consider the sectorial plans as a reference during its six-year-period of validity. In fact, according to ^{Castro et al. (2009)} the effective harmonization of the budgetary process with the instruments of planning is one of the largest areas of improvement of the accountability system of the Mexican government.

The design and approval of budgetary programs

Public policies are implemented through programs. A program is a set of activities related among each other, in which resources are exercised for the achievement of the objective that gives them sense and direction, with the aim of reaching a specific result in benefit of a target population (^{SHCP and CONEVAL, 2009}). The programs must be potential generators of public value (^{Tapia, 2016}); however, for the resources to be used effectively, the State must function as an entity of public interest, building an honest bureaucracy and a State-society relationship, where the social, political and economic actors are authorized and have the capacity to force the government to maintain the rule of law and fulfill its promises (^{Ackerman, 2004}).

Thus, good government would be a way to exercise power, characterized by efficiency, transparency and accountability, the participation of civil society and the rule of law, indicating that a government is convinced of using the resources in favor of economic and social development (^{Dermizaky, 2000}). This is why mechanisms to elaborate the public budget and those oriented at their monitoring and evaluation take on special relevance to ensure the efficiency and transparency of public function (^{Franciskovic, 2013}). Therefore, once the limits of sectorial planning were presented, the typical process of elaboration of the SAGARPA’s programs-budgets is studied in this section.

According to ^{Guerrero and López (2002)}, the budgetary process can be divided into four stages: i) Planning and formulation of the budget; ii) Review and approval; iii) Execution of public spending; and iv) Control and audit of the expenditure. Figure 1 shows the first two stages, which are the ones analyzed in this section.

*PPEF: Proyecto de Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federación [Project of Federal Spending Budget]; PEF: Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federación [Federal Spending Budget]; ROP: Reglas de Operación del Programa [Program’s Operation Rules]; AMSDA: Asociación Mexicana de Secretarios de Desarrollo Agropecuario [Mexican Association of Ministers of Agricultural and Livestock Development]; OSC: Organizaciones de la Sociedad Civil [Civil Society Organizations]; CMDRS: Consejo Mexicano para el Desarrollo Rural [Mexican Council for Rural Development]; DOF: Diario Oficial de la Federación [Official Journal of the Federation].

Source: authors’ elaboration.

Figure 1 Elaboration process of a SAGARPA program-budget. 

Presentation of the programs-budgets: Based on what is established in the Organic Law of the Federal Public Administration, before the month of June of each year the government agencies must send to the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, SHCP) the draft bill of expenditure (programs, projects, activities and budget), according to the specific guidelines that the Ministry publishes (Figure 1). Because of this, before the month of June, SAGARPA sends its programmatic proposal to be executed the following year, which to a great extent is inertial, although it can always include punctual changes. However, sometimes, particularly when a new government begins, there can be important changes. The SHCP integrates the programmatic structure with the information issued by each of the agencies and in the name of the Executive Power delivers it to the House of Representatives, on June 30 at the latest. The SHCP considers it and, if the case may be, modifies the draft bills elaborated by the agencies and integrates the Budgetary Project (Proyecto de Presupuesto, PPEF) and presents it to the House of Representatives, as established by the Federal Law of Budget and Financial Responsibility (Ley Federal de Presupuesto y Responsabilidad Hacendaria, LFPyRH), on September 8, as part of the Economic Package.

Budget review and approval: The Commission for Budget and Public Accounts of the House of Representatives is the one in charge of the analysis, discussion and approval of the PEF; it sends to another commission, the one for Agriculture and Livestock Production, whatever corresponds to the SAGARPA programs, so it can issue its opinion.

This is the moment when civil society organizations, consortiums, large producers, supplying companies, and other actors seek to interview with members of the Commission of Agriculture and Livestock Production to express their interests, propose modifications to budgetary items, and negotiate possible reassignments. Based on the interviews with key actors, it is possible to argue that at this level the modifications driven by the House of Representatives are based above all on political considerations, rather than in results from the implementation of programs in the past, and do not consider the goals of the sectorial plan; it is known that there are political factors and discretional criteria of those who apply or benefit from the programs (^{Herrera, 2013}). Once the budgetary project has been redesigned, the ruling is discussed and the PEF is approved in the Plenary Session¹, generally without adaptations to what was issued by the Agriculture and Livestock Production Commission. The evolution of the amounts allotted to the SAGARPA budgetary programs and their participation in the total PEF have an erratic behavior, with scarce relation to national priorities or performance by the programs, as has been documented by ^{Gómez (1994)} (Figure 2).

*Nominal prices deflated with the INPC Base=2010.

Source: elaborated from information of the PEF 2001-2016 (^{SHCP, 2016}).

Figure 2 Evolution of the budget assigned to SAGARPA in the period 2001-2016. 

Formulation of the Results Indicator Matrix (RIM): Before the fiscal exercise, all budgetary programs approved in the PEF must have a RIM, which is a tool used in the Logical Framework Methodology to connect the different instruments used in the design, organization, execution, monitoring, evaluation and improvement of the programs (^{CONEVAL, 2009}).

Given that the RIM and the information that supports it is the key instrument for a results oriented budget to function, by way of example an analysis was made of the information presented for the Integral Program for Rural Development (Programa Integral de Desarrollo Rural, PIDR) 2014. The main findings were the following:

In sum, the Program Indicators Matrix analyzed is a good example of how these tools are designed following formally the methodologies established by international organizations such as the ^{IDB (1997)} and ^{FAO (2004)}; however, its use to justify the appropriateness of actions is quite limited, so it turns out to be a formality rather than a real tool to influence the sector. This situation has already been seen in the institutional changes that took place before and after the six-year-period of 2000-2006, where recommendations and visions from international organizations were incorporated simply because they were popular within their discourses (^{Herrera-Tapia et al., 2009}).

Formulation of the Programs’ Operation Rules (PORs): The normative areas of SAGARPA are the ones responsible for elaborating the PORs. These rules must specify, primarily, the target population, the eligibility criteria, the concepts and amounts of support, the operative mechanics, and the indicators of monitoring, which usually refer to the advancement in the exercise of spending and the coverage of beneficiaries. Generally, these titles are defined based on the logic with which the different types of programs have been operating, but also seeking to avoid normative titles that are difficult to document because they do not have observations from the internal control organs.

Validation of the PORs: Finally, the PORs are validated by the Mexican Council on Sustainable Rural Development (Consejo Mexicano de Desarrollo Rural Sustentable, CMDRS)², the unionized producers’ organizations, and by the Mexican Association of Ministers of Agricultural and Livestock Development (Asociación Mexicana de Secretarios de Desarrollo Agropecuario, AMSDA). For the case of programs of subsidy to investment and technical services, such as PIDR, the first two actors have particular interest in simplifying access to resources, increasing the backing amounts, and reducing the counterpart of producers. At the same time, in the case of the AMSDA, their concern is directed at being able to exercise resources with greater freedom and the operation spending that they can eventually exercise as operators of the program.

Thus, it can be argued that during the whole phase of budgetary and normative authorization of the programs, the themes linked to historical or potential efficacy of the programs, criteria for their monitoring and performance evaluation or correlation with sectorial planning, are not considered. Rather, the interests of political, social and economic negotiation of the representatives, the SHCP, the state governments and the unionized organizations prevail.

Evaluation of programs and their impact

CONEVAL is the agency responsible for evaluating social policy in Mexico. This Council provides the terms of reference to carry out evaluations of the programs, depending on their horizon of evaluation; these can be basically of design, consistency and results, and specifically of performance, according to the type of program and time of operation (^{CONEVAL, 2016}).

The evaluation is centered in the budgetary programs and not in sectorial policies; therefore, the monitoring of actions of an agency like SAGARPA becomes complicated when their programs change name, objectives or indicators. For example, the programs linked to rural development of SAGARPA have repeatedly changed name, aims and objectives since the year 2007 (Figure 3).

Source: authors’ elaboration based on SAGARPA Operation Rules 2001-2016 (^{SAGARPA, 2016}).

Figure 3 Evolution of the Programs oriented at Rural Development. 

Thus, the two valid sectorial plans in this period have had seven budgetary programs, with very similar purposes, changing name in average every two years. This situation makes monitoring of the rural development policy considerably difficult, and no evidences of its performance are obtained. In addition, the design of the new programs does not incorporate the systematized learning by organizations in charge of the monitoring, tracking and evaluation of the preceding programs.

Another example is related to the programs oriented at SAGARPA extension services³. Figure 4 outlines how they have modified their design and operation: five times in the last 14 years; it is also convenient to consult ^{Muñoz and Santoyo (2010)}, who do a review of the evaluation of extension work in Mexico and of its international context, moving from a traditional linear model to the proposal of an extension model based on the creation of innovation networks.

PRODESCA: Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades [Program for the Development of Capacities]; ASTECA: Componente de Asistencia Técnica y capacitación [Component of Technical Assistance and Training]; PDCITER: Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades, Innovación Tecnológica y Extensionismo Rural [Program of Development of Capacities, Technological Innovation and Rural Extension Work]; PIDR: Programa Integral de Desarrollo Rural [Integral Program for Rural Development].

Source: authors’ elaboration based on SAGARPA programs’ Operation Rules.

Figure 4 Evolution of Extension Programs. 

In addition to extension programs having changed name, purpose and indicators in average every two years, their structures have been modified, intermittently placing technical assistance services, sometimes as programs and other times as components. This generates confusions, since CONEVAL tracks and evaluates budgetary programs and not their isolated components (^{DOF, 2005}). This situation has caused in some years for there not to be evaluations of the actions of technical assistance and extension, limiting the generation of learning to improve their performance.

Something similar happens with indicators of the programs, which tend to change with the new name, although the policy involved is the same. Table 3 shows this situation for the case of programs or components associated to SAGARPA’s extension policy.

In addition to this, the tendency also seen is that program indicators are essentially of coverage (Table 3), whether because of their simplicity for measuring or because they do not entail greater commitment than tending to the greatest number of potential beneficiaries, without taking into consideration their impacts and sustainability.

From 2008 to 2016, CONEVAL has evaluated seven programs linked to Rural Development (Figure 5) with three types of evaluations: i) design evaluation (D) that is directed at programs of recent creation or substantial modification of an existing program, with the purpose of analyzing the internal consistency of the elements that sustain and integrate the RIM, the coherence between its design and the applicable regulation, as well as the possible complementarities and duplicities with other programs; ii) specific performance evaluation (SPE), which is a synthetic valuation of the performance of programs through the analysis of indicators of results, services and management; and iii) evaluation of consistency and results (CR) (^{CONEVAL, 2016}).

It should be highlighted that with each change in program name, the CONEVAL begins design evaluations anew. Since the programs last between two and three years, the impacts of the actions are not apt to be evaluated and they do not generate learning considered in the new programmatic designs. Probably, in part, the lack of impact evaluations of SAGARPA Programs is explained because of this type of details, which according to ^{Cardozo (2013)}, is an area of improvement of all social policy in Mexico. Paradoxically, according to the officials interviewed, the changes in programs or their components have been linked to the intention of simplifying the PORs, improving control of budgets or showing a change with the arrival of a new government or official, while the intention of improving the appropriateness and compliance of sectorial objectives, which are always mentioned, are not sustained with robust evidences or indicators.

In sum, the results of evaluations of the programs have little impact on the improvement of the agriculture and livestock policy for the following reasons: