BSC Paper wins ASA award
We are proud to announce that Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation co-authored by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock won the […]
Development
This is PFM
The acronym PFM stands for Public Financial Management: But what does public financial management really mean? Matt Andrews, Marco Cangiano, Neil Cole, Paolo de Renzio, Philipp Krause, and Renaud Seligmann […]
Common Core Math: when the how undermines the what
written by Salimah Samji Without the how, the what remains fiction — often compelling fiction. Development is littered with examples of projects/reforms that have failed because no one systematically thought […]
World Cup Lessons: Is it the team or is it the star?
Amy Bass in an article in today’s CNN opinion section entitled, four key takeaways from World Cup 2014, asks the question of all sports – Is it the team, or […]
Helping REAL Capacity Emerge in Rwanda using PDIA
written by Matt Andrews What do you do if your government has been pursuing reforms for years, with apparent success, but your economy is still not growing? What do you […]
BSC video 35: Functional indicators as a way to build capacity
Data is an important part of state functionality. If states want to be capable they need to know where people are, how many people there are, etc. in order to […]
BSC video 34: Measuring success – means or ends?
Do appearances matter as much as action does? We often forget that governments exist to do and not just to be. We thus focus on the means of being rather […]
BSC video 33: Multi-agent leadership in action
Who leads? How do they lead? When do they lead? Why do they lead? Answers to these questions are very important in understanding how change happens. Change is about people […]
BSC video 32: Who is the leader?
In a study of successful change, we interviewed 150 people in 12 different places and asked them “who is the leader?” Instead of the listing the 12 champions, they responded […]
BSC video 31: Crawling together in Cambodia
Everyone agrees that building the rule of law is important. But building the capability of a justice system is a long and difficult process, often susceptible to isomorphic mimicry. In […]