Elsevier

World Development

Volume 51, November 2013, Pages 234-244
World Development

Escaping Capability Traps Through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2013.05.011Get rights and content

Summary

Many development initiatives fail to improve performance because they promote isomorphic mimicry—governments change what they look like, not what they do. This article proposes a new approach to doing development, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), which contrasts with standard approaches. PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and prioritized performance problems (instead of transplanting “best practice” solutions). PDIA encourages positive deviance and experimentation (instead of requiring that agents implement policies as designed). PDIA creates feedback loops that facilitate rapid learning (instead of lagged learning from ex post evaluation). PDIA engages many agents to create viable, relevant interventions (instead of depending on external experts).

Section snippets

INTRODUCTION

Some building is easy. Development projects have, by and large, been successful at building physical stuff: schools, highways, irrigation canals, hospitals and even building the buildings that house government ministries, courts, and agencies. But some building is hard. As anyone with experience in development knows, building capabilities of the human systems—including that human system called “the state”—has proven much more difficult. This is especially so where the goal is to effectively

CAPABILITY TRAPS IN THE EFFORT TO BUILD STATE CAPABILITY

Development interventions can be usefully analyzed at three social levels (Figure 1): agents, at the front line and in leadership positions; organizations inhabited by agents; and the environment or ecosystem of organizations. Within each category, Figure 1 also illustrates the poles of behaviors (for agents and organizations) or conditions (within eco-systems).

Frontline workers decide daily between mere compliance with rules (or even negative deviations) and positive performance-driven

ESCAPING CAPABILITY TRAPS AND BUILDING STATE CAPABILITY

The emphasis on form (what organizations “look like”) over function (what they actually “do”) is a crucial characteristic of capability traps facing many developing countries. The challenge of escaping these traps involves focusing on improved government functionality as the key to improved state capability. The basic message must be that interventions are successful if they empower a constant process through which agents make organizations better performers, regardless of the forms adopted to

CONTRASTS AND SIMILARITIES

The main contrast of PDIA would be with “big development” efforts of mainstream development organizations such as bilateral donors and the World Bank. These organizations are full of dedicated and intelligent people who are themselves often locked into ecosystems and organizational practices beyond their control. This leads to problems with effective implementation of Bank projects, which has long been discussed (at least since the Wapenhans report of 1992) but is very difficult to solve; in

CONCLUSION

This article is a follow up on prior work that tries to explain the limited results of many efforts to build state capabilities in developing countries (Pritchett, Woolcock, & Andrews, 2013). This work’s core argument is that the politics and process of development interventions have fostered and exacerbated capability traps in many developing countries, wherein governments are being required to adopt best practice reforms that ultimately cannot work and end up crowding out alternative ideas

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank colleagues, seminar participants and executive education students at the Harvard Kennedy School, Center for Global Development, and World Bank for comments received in preparing this article. We are particularly grateful to Salimah Samji and Frauke de Weijer for their comments and ongoing contributions to this work. This paper was initially produced as part of a broader “Building State Capability” research agenda at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International

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