1. Doing development differently
Drawing together the strands

2. 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?

3. + + A proposition Better results Politically smart Adaptive
Locally led

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. + + 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