Person:

Walton, Michael

This paper examines the potential role of civil society action in increasing state accountability for development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It further develops the analytical framework of the World Development Report 2004 on accountability relationships, to emphasize the underlying political economy drivers of accountability and implications for how civil society is constituted and functions. It argues on this basis that the most important domain for improving accountability is through the political relations between citizens, civil society, and state leadership. The evidence broadly suggests that when higher-level political leadership provides sufficient or appropriate powers for citizen participation in holding within-state agencies or frontline providers accountable, there is frequently positive impact on outcomes. However, the big question remaining for such types of interventions is how to improve the incentives of higher-level leadership to pursue appropriate policy design and implementation. The paper argues that there is substantial scope for greater efforts in this domain, including through the support of external aid agencies. Such efforts and support should, however, build on existing political and civil society structures (rather than transplanting "best practice” initiatives from elsewhere), and be structured for careful monitoring and assessment of impact.

This paper explores the nature and drivers of inequality in Chile. It is a companion paper to Lecaros et al (2023) that analyzed the widespread citizen perceptions and concerns over high inequalities and lack of fairness in Chile. A central theme is that Chile is in a form of “inequality trap”, in which reinforcing elements of the system perpetuate inequality. This is in spite of the democratic transition of 1990, significant growth, and the large expansion of social provisioning. Chile has been successful with respect to poverty: there has been a dramatic reduction in absolute income poverty, and a near-universal floor for education, health, and pensions, albeit with pervasive issues of quality. However, most dimensions of inequality are perpetuated through structural features of the socio-economic system. These include: the inter-generational transmission of financial, human, social and cultural capital—notably through the education system; concentrated ownership in the business sector; a segmented labor market; and inequalities in access to mechanisms for managing employment and health risks and income insecurity in old age. There is a polarized discourse around the “neoliberal” model, but the real issues concern how structural inequalities interact with both market and government forces. There is no panacea, but there is substantial scope for public action that can tackling unjustified inequalities while also supporting efficiency. The kinds of systemic change required echo—if in new forms—the large-scale policy and institutional changes that now-industrialized countries went through in the 20th century, that were only partially modified by the “neoliberal” reversal from around the 1980s. These were underpinned by major political conjunctures, and there is an important outstanding question as to whether Chile’s politics can support the kinds of changes needed.

Some see India's corporate sector as the fundamental driver of recent and future prosperity. Others see it as a source of excessive market power, personal enrichment, and influence over the State, with an ultimately distorting influence. To inform this debate, this paper analyses the correlates of profitability of firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, covering a dynamic period - in terms of firm entry and growth - from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. Overall, the results do not provide support for the systematic exercise of market power via the product market. At least for this period, the story is more consistent with a competitive and dynamic business sector, despite the continued dominance of business houses and public sector firms in terms of sales and assets. Those with opposing views can, with justification, argue that our analysis does not cover influences, such as corporate governance and state-corporate relations, which may paint a less flattering picture of the corporate sector's role. Those broader themes deserve further attention.

Chile has pioneered many things: a market-oriented, “neoliberal” approach to development; an impressive transition from authoritarianism to democracy; innovations in social policy; and an extraordinary series of street protests between 2006 and 2019. While often lauded as a model of economic and social development, the protests reflect acute concerns over perceived failures in the Chilean political, economic and cultural system, concerns that were profoundly inflected with issues of inequality and lack of fairness. To inform this contrast, this paper undertakes a systematic assessment of the perceptions and perspectives of Chilean citizens, both in the context of the protests and in their broader expressed views in surveys. The core theme is that “the street was right”, in the specific sense that the protests reflected much wider sentiments across social classes over perceived inequities in economic advancement, social provisioning, and the undignified “treatment” by state actors and elites. The paper then compares these perceptions with some of the “objective” measures of inequality. While alternative measures indicate modest declines in some measures of inequality, Chile remains a very high inequality society, in relation to income, wealth, and education. These perceptions and patterns are central to Chile’s current development challenges, in ways that resonate with the position of many countries in today’s polarized environment. This is the first of two papers, with the sequel exploring the underlying drivers of inequality and implications for policy direction.

This paper explores the interactions between state and society in rural India within a major community-based development program. We use guidelines of the state, transcripts of 90 interviews and focus groups amongst representatives of actors of all major groups, and field team workshops to construct an in-depth view of the processes and interactions within the ecosystem of six National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) self-help groups (SHGs) in the state of Madhya Pradesh. These SHGs are linked to credit and market related services and support systems provided by the state. We argue that in design, and even more in implementation, the program exemplifies two substantive tensions. The first tension is between a top-down, “engineering” approach to state delivery on the one hand, and a stated intention to mobilize community and create “institutions of the poor” on the other. The second is between a primary reliance on existing village hierarchies on the one hand, and a goal of empowering poor women from disadvantaged social groups on the other. We argue that these tensions generate an internal logic to state functioning and to on-the-ground processes that lead the SHGs and their federations in our case studies to be stuck at a low level of functioning, and in some cases to become dysfunctional. This study has implications for understanding functionality as the product of relational processes within and between state and society, and home in on a key actor at the interface of these processes - Community Resource Persons (CRPs).

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques commonly used in international development, including Randomized Control Trials (RCT) and quasi-experimental methods, are good at assessing specific effects of interventions but are not designed for the change processes inherent to innovation and scaling within a system. There is a need to reconstruct how we use existing measurement tools, techniques, and methodologies so that they capture the complexity of the environment in which an intervention or change occurs. We introduce Adaptive Evaluation, designed to learn at various levels of complexity while supporting the transformation needed to foster sustainable change. An Adaptive Evaluation uses three main approaches to work with complex questions—systems diagnosis, theory-based assessment of change processes, and iterative designs. An Adaptive Evaluation typically builds hypotheses from field-based interactions, emphasizes learning over testing, advocates open-mindedness with techniques, and appreciates the value of dialogue and participation in navigating complex processes. It can use RCT or similar techniques to analyse specific processes within a system or a development cycle, but these are embedded in a broader approach to assessment and interpretation. It is designed to be flexible and adjust to shifting contexts. Finally, an Adaptive Evaluation can be applied at any stage in a complex intervention's lifecycle, from the interpretation of the system and change processes to rapid experimentation, prototyping, and testing of select interventions, and then adaptation to different settings for impact at scale. This paper provides the theoretical basis for an Adaptive Evaluation—the main approaches, core ideology, process, and applications.