written by Lant Pritchett Improving “accountability” has been a popular agenda for improving public sector performance for some time, and I have promoted accountability as a key to effectiveness myself. In reviewing Dan Honig’s new book, Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work, I want to make a…Continue Reading Account based accountability and Aid Effectiveness
written by Tim O’Brien Leader of farming cooperative in central Sri Lanka that diversified into ginger production as drought increasingly hurt rice cultivation. If you live in a developed country, odds are that you think about climate change as something that will harm future generations — your children or your grandchildren perhaps. But if you…Continue Reading We recently ran a PDIA course on climate change adaptation. Why?
written by Matt Andrews A colleague asked me two questions in response to last week’s blog on initiating PDIA: “It does not sound like you develop a thorough plan for action. Is this correct?” “How do you move from the workshop to action, and particularly to action learning?” I will reflect on these questions in future…Continue Reading Active and adaptive planning versus set plans in PDIA
written by Matt Andrews “Once there is interest, how do you start a PDIA project?” Many people have asked me this question. They are often in consulting firms or donor agencies thinking about working on PDIA with host governments, or in some central bureau in the government itself. “We have an authorizer, know the itch that…Continue Reading Initiating PDIA: Start by running…and then run some more
written by Matt Andrews “How do you decide where to work on a PDIA project?” This is probably the most common question I have been asked with respect to PDIA. After over 5 years of doing this work in a variety of countries and sectors, I have a simple answer: “When we find authorizers with an…Continue Reading PDIA and Authorizers with an itch
written by Lant Pritchett At a recent holiday party I was discussing organizations and innovations with a friend of mine who teaches at the Harvard Business School about organizations and is a professor and student about technology and history. I told him I was thinking about the lessons for the development “best practice” mantra from…Continue Reading Best Practice is a Pipe Dream: The AK47 vs M16 debate and development practice
Guest blog written by Susana Cordeiro Guerra Why is it that, despite the abundant resources invested and the largely favorable macroeconomic conditions that have prevailed until recently, middle-income countries have been unable to systematically deliver quality basic services, such as education and safety, to their citizens? Despite a wide variety of attempts to improve these crucial…Continue Reading Finding the Fringes of Formality: Organizational Capability in Street-Level Bureaucracies in Brazil
written by Lant Pritchett The UN’s post-2015 “Sustainable Development Goals” (or “Global Goals”) debuted to decidedly mixed reviews. Phyllis Pomerantz points out that with 169 targets “if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.” Bill Easterly refers to the SDG as “senseless, dreamy, garbled,” Lord Mark Malloch Brown’s called them “higgedly-piggedly,” Charles Kenny describes…Continue Reading The New Global Goals Spell the End of Kinky Development
Guest post written by Brad Cunningham Basketball players everywhere are trying their best to shoot a ball through a hoop. In pursuit of this goal, players develop their own style of shooting. The image below shows three of the greatest basketball players just as they are about to shoot. At first glance, their form looks…Continue Reading Practicing Governance: PDIA and Basketball
written by Salimah Samji Most development practitioners think that they are working on problems. However, what they often mean by the word ‘problem’ is the ‘lack of a solution’. This leads to designing typical, business as usual interventions, without addressing the actual problem. Essentially, they sell solutions to specific problems they have identified and prioritized…Continue Reading How can we learn when we don’t understand the problem?
