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Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)
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 ...
Doing Problem Driven Work
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2015-12)
We often observe that more successful efforts to establish complex state capabilities are problem driven; focused relentlessly on solving a specific, attention-grabbing problem. This is the first principle of Problem Driven ...
Doing Iterative and Adaptive Work
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01)
Many of the challenges in international development are complex in nature. They involve many actors in uncertain contexts and with unclear solutions. Our work has proposed an approach to addressing such challenges, called ...
Managing Your Authorizing Environment in a PDIA Process
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01)
Development and state building processes are about change. Change is, however, elusive in many contexts. In prior work, we have offered problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) as an approach to tackle wicked hard change ...
Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2012-06)
In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term ...
The Challenge of Building (Real) State Capability
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2015-12)
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 ...
Scaling PDIA through Broad Agency, and Your Role
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01)
Many development challenges are complex, involving a lot of different agents and with unknown dimensions. Solutions to these challenges are often unknown, and contextually dependent. At the same time, there are political ...
The Big Stuck in State Capability for Policy Implementation
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01)
We divide the 102 historically developing countries (HDCs) into those with ‘very weak’, ‘weak’, ‘middle’, and ‘strong’ state capability. Analyzing the levels and recent growth rates of the HDCs’ capability for policy ...
Escaping Capability Traps through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2012-06)
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 ...