Answer to Question 13...and Glen Wright's comment
Nice comment. I agree completely with teh description you give about how external reform support can provoke change, incrementally, over time. The work in Albania has been ongoing for a good while now, and has been pretty consistent--a number of the same internal and external faces, building on small steps, some that have worked and some that have not worked, patiently, with trust-building, growing capacity and political appetite, etc. In this example one sees that reform does take time. But one also sees that reform happens over time if (and this is a bog if, given Glen's comment) the process of reform is consistent, truly incremental (building steop by step on past interventions), and external parties don't push governments to do stupid things in the short run. I have added some recommendations for improving external influence at the end of this email, as ways in which I see donors need to adjust their processes of reform to facilitate real reform.
You ask if I think the ground swell for change within the development monoliths will work. I think we all have reason to expect they won't. In my research I found serious people within narrow areas like PFM and in broader areas noting the need for less mimicry, less best practice focus, more localized engagement, etc. since 1992 (almost as soon as this work began). The voices of critique are far more influential and impressive than mine and others (think of Dani Rodrik, Amartya Sen, Evans, Chan, Amsden, Grindle, and many more). I even find World Bank commitments to change, almost every ten years. And little change.
There are obviously multiple reasons for this, and the link between aid and reform is one of them (disbursements need to be triggerd by visible, short term improvements, fostering what I call 'reform as signals'). I am attaching a working paper by Lant Pritchett, Michaal Woolcock and I on this topic. We believe taht the way donors do development is creating a 'Big Stuck' situation where governments are not being encouraged to do things taht make them more functional. In my experince, many folks in the development comunity read this kind of work and say 'yes you have a point but I am not part of that problem' or 'we can't really change the way things work'. I discuss the problem in the last chapter of my forthcoming book (you must know by now that I am spending lots of time on this book at the moment!):
The book’s last chapter acknowledges that the problems of poorly fitted institutional reform in development cannot be solved without change in the way organizations like the World Bank think about and do such reforms. It also recognizes that these organizations face constraints in adopting new ways of doing reform. Such entities have noted their poor records with reform in the past, even in high profile evaluations on the topic. They have introduced strategies to do things differently. These seldom alter the way business is done, however. It is much like a carpenter acknowledging his pegs do not fit the holes but insisting that the process he follows is correct and does not require adjustment. “I don’t need to change,” he might say; “It would be great if all the pegs fit into all the holes, but give me some credit for what I have done. Look at all the nice pegs I have created, and remember that some of the holes were filled by the pegs. I am sure more pegs will fit more holes in time.” The chapter asks why organizations like the World Bank would take such a position on failure and routinely resist change. It identifies why development organizations and developing country governments keep producing institutional reforms with limits and ultimately presents some practical ideas to address these issues—changing the rules of development itself.
An excerpt on how I think external reform recommendations could be improved:
The process of finding and fitting institutional reform is similar to the iterative route carpenters might follow when crafting pegs for difficult-to-fill holes. They may look at different types of pegs for inspiration, considering some square oak pegs, round pine pegs, small pegs, rough pegs, smooth pegs, and so forth. Ultimately, their selection would draw on attributes of many examples—perhaps leading to a hybrid round, rough oak peg that fits the hole needing filling. This kind of hybrid is evident now in Rwanda and Indonesia, where decentralization and anti-corruption reforms have yielded new institutions that incorporate some aspects of external best practice with other aspects of internal tradition. Neither of the two examples is a pure form of any pre-existing best practice, and neither emerged by pursuing best practice. Rather, as has been shown, they came about as a result of incremental processes supported by external partners.
Experience in these cases yields recommendations for ways to improve the process and product of externally influenced institutional reforms. First, the content of these reforms should emphasize short term actions that facilitate long term change. Best practice reforms described in chapter four contrast markedly with this. They introduce long term solutions—like best practice international accounting standards—in short time periods, promising final products from four to six year projects. The idea behind incrementalism is different. Reforms should start with small first steps that lead to learning and next steps, which cumulatively provide a path to long term change. External short-term projects should focus on the short-term actions that facilitate this kind of gradual change, and emphasize as results the degree to which governments ‘find’ new ideas and build new capacities and political appetite for bigger next steps—fostering longer term, endogenous change.
This leads to a second recommendation, centered on the importance of external parties allowing and even cultivating ‘muddling through’. This can be done by fostering experimental interventions, crafting ongoing evaluation and learning opportunities in these interventions, and ensuring that lessons feed future experiments. Again, such approach contrasts with dominant ways of doing institutional reform in development. The tendency is to focus projects on specific pre-designed interventions, with a linear route to implementation—given indicators used to determine whether project funds disburse, for instance. This approach focuses reformers on routine, mimetic, reproduction of best practice content and ultimately leads to the kind of limits discussed in chapter six; reforms are adopted in form but lack functionality.
Building on this idea, those designing external reforms should be careful not to focus interventions on reproducing what they see ex-ante as the ‘right rules’. Rather, they should help construct a problem focus for internal reformers, and provoke an awareness of contextual realities that will shape solutions. This means constructing issues as problems (discussed in chapter seven) and bringing local actors into processes of discussing and addressing these problems (discussed in the next chapter). This is the opposite of a ‘Cargo Cult’ approach to doing external reforms (discussed in chapter three) in that it focuses the process and product of change on local issues. As discussed, reforms need to be defined in this way if they are to be relevant—politically accepted and practically possible.
Another set of recommendations relates to the way in which external agents can help facilitate broad-based scanning and the translation of reform ideas. First, external agents should realize the important role they can play in providing external ideas into a menu of institutional reform options. They should note, however, that this role requires more than representing one-best-way models and narrow sets of ideas. The role requires providing broad sets of ideas, with details about where they emerged, when, under what conditions, and with what pre-requisites. The goal, as discussed, is to construct a host of menu items with the attached recipes, facilitating choice. Simultaneously, external agents should develop ways in which internal ideas can also enter the menu. This requires seeking out internal agents with ideas, working with these agents to flesh such ideas out, and making it clear that these ideas have equal standing (and even more standing) with external ideas.
Finally, external agents should facilitate processes where internal reformers can experiment with combinations of the ideas they have in front of them. This is a core part of the ‘muddling through’ process and involves creating opportunities, through externally supported grants, projects and the like, for action-based interventions, with organized evaluation, learning and feedback mechanisms. External agencies pursuing such approach should be open to the creative, locally relevant but potentially strange looking hybrids that emerge from such processes. The goal should always be to facilitate the process itself, more functional institutions, and solved problems.
