Person:

Andrews, Matthew

Many reform results fall below expectations in the development arena, especially in the public sector. Do the reforms just need more time to work better, or should we adjust our expectations? In addressing this question, the current article draws from isomorphism to think about potential limits to reform in developing countries. The theory is considered appropriate for thinking about change processes in the developing world. It presents change as motivated more by the need for legitimacy than efficiency and, in identifying the mechanics of change, points to potential limits of such change: to organizational dimensions that are visible, peripheral and involves concentrated sets of professional agents. These limiting factors are applied to a study of public financial management reform in 31 African countries which shows that some dimensions do appear more limited to isomorphic influence than others. Isomorphic change may indeed face natural limits, something the development community should consider in thinking about how it goes about facilitating and motivating reform in its client countries.

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. In addition, the flow of development resources and legitimacy without demonstrated improvements in performance undermines the impetus for effective action to build state capability or improve performance. This dynamic facilitates “capability traps” in which state capability stagnates, or even deteriorates, over long periods of time even though governments remain engaged in developmental rhetoric and continue to receive development resources. How can countries escape capability traps? We propose an approach, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), based on four core principles, each of which stands in sharp contrast with the standard approaches. First, PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting preconceived and packaged “best practice” solutions). Second, it seeks to create an authorizing environment for decision-making that encourages positive deviance and experimentation (as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them exactly as designed). Third, it embeds this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from ex post “evaluation”). Fourth, it actively engages broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant, and supportable (as opposed to a narrow set of external experts promoting the top-down diffusion of innovation).

Governance indicators have come under fire in recent years, especially the World Governance Indicators (WGIs). Critics present these indicators as a-theoretical and biased. Critics of the critics counter that no better alternatives exist. We suggest otherwise, arguing that more appropriate ‘governance’ indicators will (i) have theoretical grounding, (ii) focus on specific fields of engagement, (iii) emphasize outcomes, and (iv) control for key contextual differences in comparing countries. Such measures can help indicate where countries seem to have governance problems, allowing second stage analyses of what these problems are. We present under national five mortality rates adjusted for country income groups as an example of such measure, presenting data for contextually controlled outcomes in this specific field to show where governance seems better and worse. The United States is shown up as relatively weak, whereas a country like Pakistan seems to have better governance in this sector than other low income countries. The indicator allows questions about why governance of this sector might be problematic in certain contexts and easier in others.

Development involves change, but many development initiatives produce unimpressive results. The authors ask why and consider how to close the gap between the intended change and what we actually see in the evidence. This paper presents the findings of a study, initiated by the multi-donor Global Leadership Initiative and led by the World Bank Institute (WBI), to examine leadership in the change processes of fourteen capacity development interventions in eight developing countries, through 140 in-depth structured interviews. It explores what it takes to make change happen and in particular, the role leadership plays in effecting change. The authors propose that leadership contributes to change when it builds “change space” by fostering acceptance for change, granting authority for change, introducing or freeing the abilities necessary to achieve change. This “change space” is required to ensure contextual readiness for change and foster progress through the difficult stages of the change process. An analytical framework is introduced to illustrate the dimensions of this “change space” and its limits in organizational and social change. The authors argue that a lack of “change space” in many development contexts may be overlooked, contributing to failure. The paper concludes that leadership manifests in different ways in different contexts, depending on the contextual readiness and factors that shape change and leadership opportunities; but the key characteristics of plurality, functionality, problem orientation and “change space” creation are likely to be common to all successful leadership-led change events.

This paper asks how strong African Public Financial Management (PFM) has become, after a decade and more of reform. How well do African PFM systems in place now facilitate effective public financial management? Where are the next challenges and how can they be met? It analyzes recent PFM assessments in 31 governments to answer these questions, identifying patterns of strengths and weaknesses across the PFM system and across countries. In respect of the former, the study finds that budgets are made better than they are executed, practice lags behind the creation of processes and laws, and processes are stronger where concentrated actors are engaged. In respect of the latter, the study finds that different countries fall into different ‘PFM performance leagues’ and countries in the different leagues look very different to each other. A range of factors influence which league a country is associated with; including economic growth, stability, reform tenure and colonial heritage. On the basis of this evidence, the paper argues that existing reforms face limits that can only be overcome with adjustments in reform approach; with less focus on pushing reform technicalities and more on creating ‘space’ in which reform takes place, less concentration of engagements with small sets of actors and more on expanding engagements, and less emphasis on reproducing the same reform models and more on better understanding what context-appropriate reforms look like.

Officials working on public policies must answer questions like ‘What does policy success mean?’ and ‘How should I pursue policy work in order to achieve success?’ These are difficult questions, but there are ways to respond. One way draws on what I call the program logic of policy success, which suggests that: (i) Success requires efficiently meeting goals that stakeholders view as relevant, (ii) by doing work focused on impacting high-level objectives through programs that deliver promised time-sensitive outputs and outcomes according to a clear, logical plan. I believe this logic dominates the global public policy community, as ‘the way’ officials and organizations should think about and do policy work. This paper tests such belief, showing that officials do think in this way and that this thinking is influenced by common budgeting and evaluation mechanisms. I conclude by asking if this way of thinking poses any concerns, especially if it biases policy organizations to produce some kinds of policy success and not others.

Public policy work is hard, especially when one works in developing countries. It is even difficult to define what success looks like, and thus how to manage towards success. Literature helps manage such difficulty, providing studies that define the concept and show how it can be achieved. A core message from such is that success is multi-dimensional, and practitioner need to focus on multiple criteria when doing their policy work. But what dimensions and criteria matter? And do development practitioners really adopt this multi-dimensional view? Tackling such questions, the current paper reviews 45 applied studies from the public policy, project management and development evaluation literatures to see what they identify as key success criteria and if the practical studies (about development evaluation) are in sync with the more academic messages. Reading across all three literatures, I identify 30 potential success criteria in 6 categories or dimensions (program, impact and endurance, capability, political, stakeholder, and process). I find that the development evaluation literature focuses on a narrow set of 7 criteria, mostly in one dimension (program success) as compared to broader perspectives in the other literatures. This suggests that development practitioners have a narrow view on success, which is out of step with academic views on the topic. A conclusion proposes a broader approach for these practitioners.

Efforts to build state capability often take the form of commonly used, highly designed and engineered best practice solutions that have worked in many other places and that we suspect (and hope) will work again in many contexts. Such interventions do sometimes work, especially when the treatment actually addresses problems that fester in the context. Where the contextual problems are different, however, the treatment is just isomorphic mimicry—it looks good but will not be a solution to problems that actually matter. Development organizations often cannot see this, however, and offer the same solution again and again—hoping for a different outcome but imposing a capability trap on the policy context, where a new diagnosis and prescription is actually needed. In some countries the treatment has an even worse impact, fostering premature load bearing—where the context cannot actually handle what is prescribed. How can development experts identify in advance where they will have such negative impacts, and how can they identify in advance where they need to do development differently? This paper addresses such questions, and introduces an approach to building state capability in the latter contexts (called 1804 contexts), called problem driven iterative adaptation.

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.

"Leadership" is not a common topic for research in international development. In recent years, however, prominent studies like the 2008 Growth Commission Report noted the importance of leadership in development. This and other studies focused on individual leaders—or heroes—when referencing what leaders did to foster development. The current article asks if heroes really lead development. It deconstructs the implied theory behind a ‘hero orthodoxy’ into four hypotheses; about how change happens in development, who leads it, how it emerges, and how it is bought to completion. Through a qualitative study of twelve interventions in contexts like Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Kosovo, the article shows that these hypotheses are too simple to really help explain who leads development. It appears that change is complex and requires complex multi-agent leadership interventions.