Person:

Samji, Salimah

Governments across the world regularly pursue reforms that achieve less than was originally expected or is needed to make the state function better. The limits to reform success are often obvious in even the early days of reform, where gaps and weaknesses manifest. Many governments have no mechanisms built into their reform processes to see these gaps and weaknesses, however, and persist with predefined reform plans instead of adapting designs to close the gaps and address weaknesses. One antidote to this challenge is to create reflection points where reformers scrutinize their progress to identify weaknesses, reflect on these weaknesses, and adapt their next steps to address the weaknesses. In the spirit of John Kingdon’s work on ‘policy windows’, we call these reflection points ‘adaptation windows’—moments where reformers acknowledge problems in their reforms, adapt reforms to address such, and mobilize support for this adaptation. This paper discusses an effort to open an adaptation window for reformers to ‘see’ and then respond to public financial management (PFM) reform gaps and weaknesses in Mozambique. The paper details why and how this work was pursued, and also reflects on results of the government’s reflection at the adaptation window.

There is an inherent tension between implementing organizations—which have specific objectives and narrow missions and mandates—and executive organizations—which provide resources to multiple implementing organizations. Ministries of finance/planning/budgeting allocate across ministries and projects/programmes within ministries, development organizations allocate across sectors (and countries), foundations or philanthropies allocate across programmes/grantees. Implementing organizations typically try to do the best they can with the funds they have and attract more resources, while executive organizations have to decide what and who to fund. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) has always been an element of the accountability of implementing organizations to their funders. There has been a recent trend towards much greater rigor in evaluations to isolate causal impacts of projects and programmes and more ‘evidence base’ approaches to accountability and budget allocations. Here we extend the basic idea of rigorous impact evaluation—the use of a valid counter-factual to make judgments about causality—to emphasize that the techniques of impact evaluation can be directly useful to implementing organizations (as opposed to impact evaluation being seen by implementing organizations as only an external threat to their funding). We introduce structured experiential learning (which we add to M&E to get MeE) which allows implementing agencies to actively and rigorously search across alternative project designs using the monitoring data that provides real time performance information with direct feedback into the decision loops of project design and implementation. Our argument is that within-project variations in design can serve as their own counter-factual and this dramatically reduces the incremental cost of evaluation and increases the direct usefulness of evaluation to implementing agencies. The right combination of M, e, and E provides the right space for innovation and organizational capability building while at the same time providing accountability and an evidence base for funding agencies.

Many states possess substantial capacity but experience gaps between potential and performance. This paper argues that the gaps reflect differences in state capability, defined as the empowered ability of state agents to transform capacity into performance. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience with Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), the paper examines how state capabilities develop and what role outsiders can play in supporting their development. PDIA combines action learning, through which insiders build capability by working on real problems, and action research, through which outsiders learn about capability by accompanying these processes. Thus, capabilities emerge through repeated cycles of action, reflection, experimentation, and adaptation. The paper also uses episodes from the television series Ted Lasso as a metaphor for this process, illustrating how a coach from the outside contributes not by providing solutions but by creating conditions in which individuals and teams learn, adapt, and discover their own capabilities in and across multiple moments. The findings challenge conventional approaches to external assistance. Capability is not built through products, plans, or technical advice alone, but through the relationships, experiences, and learning processes that enable state agents to transform capacity into performance.

A growing literature demonstrates that kindness improves individual well-being, meaning, and social connection. This paper adds to such literature by asking if intentional acts of kindness strengthen relationships, psychological safety, and supportive norms within collaborative teams. It draws on a field experiment embedded within a three-month problem-driven learning program involving eighteen participants working in teams on real public problems. These participants undertook intentional acts of kindness toward assigned teammates and subsequently reflected on the acts they gave and received. Findings suggest that relatively small acts of kindness generate substantial relational effects, with participants reporting increased appreciation, support, encouragement, and belonging. The strongest effects occurred when acts demonstrated attention, memory, and understanding. The evidence also suggests that repeated acts contributed to psychological safety and the emergence of norms of mutual support. The paper thus argues that kindness functions not simply as an individual virtue but as a relational capability that helps teams collaborate, learn, and solve problems together. Small acts of kindness appear capable of producing effects that extend beyond individual well-being to influence relationships, team norms, and collaborative performance.

The state capability literature emphasizes the importance of problem-driven governance. Mayne et al. (2020) identify three capabilities that appear central to such governance: reflective, collaborative, and data-analytic capabilities. However, important questions remain regarding the foundations that make these higher-order capabilities possible. This paper explores these foundations—or building blocks—by revisiting an intervention undertaken within Mozambique’s public financial management reforms. Using process tracing and interpretive coding of the intervention’s case narrative, the analysis identifies and examines how problem-driven behaviors emerged. Such analysis leads to the identification of seven foundations that appear to underpin problem-driven capability, organized in three domains: 1. contextually actionable knowledge, comprising know-how and know-what; 2. the mobilization and empowerment of agents, comprising individual motivation and authorization to change; and 3. the empowered ability to navigate contextual systems, comprising institutional navigation, resource re-mobilization, and strategic time management. The paper argues that these foundations function in ways similar to conversion factors in Sen’s capability approach and to the microfoundations approach in the dynamic capabilities literature. State capability— particularly the capability for problem-driven governance—should be understood as a multiplicative combination of these foundations or building blocks, from which higher-order reflective, collaborative, and data-analytic capabilities emerge.

Development is widely understood as requiring stronger capability, yet there is little agreement about what capability is or how it is built. This paper argues that development is fundamentally a process of building the foundations of capability. Drawing on the capability approach, dynamic capability theory, and the state capability literature, it conceptualizes capability as the empowered ability to turn capacity into performance, and identifies seven mutually reinforcing building blocks that underpin it: contextually actionable know-what, contextually actionable know-how, intrinsic motivation, authorization, institutional navigation, resource mobilization, and strategic time and timing. The paper distinguishes between ordinary capability, which enables reliable execution of established tasks, and adaptive capability, which enables individuals, organizations, and societies to diagnose unfamiliar problems, learn, experiment, and create new ways of working. It argues that development depends particularly on strengthening the foundations of adaptive capability, from which new institutions, routines, and established capabilities emerge. The paper further suggests that these foundations are best developed through experiential, problem-driven learning rather than through training or technical assistance alone. Evidence from participant reflections in Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) programs illustrates how these seven foundations can be strengthened through iterative engagement with real-world problems. The paper concludes that development interventions should be judged not only by the solutions they deliver, but by whether they leave behind stronger foundations for future problem solving and sustained positive change.