Doing development differently Drawing together the strands

A widely shared set of concerns Perverse political and political-economic incentives Global results very uneven; possibly getting harder to achieve; still too much wasted effort Great complexity: many variables, actors and feedback-loops, producing uncertainty about possible pathways of change Still too much external leadership, too little genuinely domestic effort What does this mean for programming?

+ + A proposition Better results Politically smart Adaptive Locally led

Getting politically smarter As seen in this course and endorsed by WDR 2017: The ability of institutions to deliver the needed credible commitments, coordination and cooperation … is shaped by patterns of power, including exclusion, capture and clientelism This constrains development in crucial ways Yet, as we have seen, even successful development starts within exclusionary, elite- captured and clientelistic systems So the challenge is to fully recognise the constraints but get smarter about “working the system” – achieving stepwise change in feasible ways

Responding to complexity Complex systems: thousands of mutually responsive agents; hundreds of interconnected collective- action and principal-agent problems Interventions that specify in advance how they are going to achieve their goals (blueprint plans) are deluding themselves and their funders Purposeful trial and error, or problem-driven adaptive programming, is more honest and more likely to get results

Local leadership of reform Previous efforts to guarantee country ownership were flawed, partly because they depended on a blueprint planning approach Adaptive interventions enable and require a big role for indigenous reform leaders Externally led initiatives find it hard to avoid being “solution driven” Problem-driven approaches are highly motivating for local leaders The necessary understanding to “work the system” does not come easily to outsiders ©Jubilee USA Network, 2012

+ + Putting it all together Better results Politically smart Adaptive Realistic about political context Politically smart Astute enough to work the system + Problem-, not solution-driven Better results Adaptive Purposefully experimental + Focused on locally salient problems Locally led Locally negotiated and delivered