Publications
BSC faculty, fellows, and affiliates regularly publish research in a wide range of academic and policy venues. These include books, book chapters, working papers, articles, cases, and reports. In addition, we have hundreds of blog posts that you can read.
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Featured BookBuilding State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action
This book provides evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, identifies capability traps that hold many governments back, and describes a process that can be used to escape these traps called PDIA (Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation).
Featured Publications
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Tackling Learning Poverty in Sierra Leone’s Education System through the Lens of the PDIA
Guest blog by Irina Bilyalova, Orlando Carvajal, Vaiba Flomo, and Sonali Verma We were four students brought together by a shared interest in solving real-world problems. Three from the Harvard Kennedy School and one from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. One of us was from the United States; three of us were…
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Case: Using PDIA to Transform Waste Management in Amman
In early 2022, the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) faced a growing waste crisis. Given its population of 4.5 million people generating approximately 3,000 tons of solid municipal waste daily, half of Jordan’s total, the city’s rapid growth had significantly outpaced its waste management infrastructure. In response to this challenge, a remarkable two-year transformation using Problem-Driven…
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Can Outsiders Help Build State Capability? Lessons from Ted Lasso
Gaps between potential and performance are common in states across the globe. This paper argues that these gaps represent differences in state capability, and compares Ted Lasso to how outside actors can impact that capability.
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Process and Implementation Evaluations: A Primer
Authors investigate six different types of process and implementation evaluations and highlight their strengths and weaknesses to better comprehend successful interventions.
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Public policy actors view success differently, and it matters
Different leaders in the policy world have different visions of success. This paper proves that success naturally comes when actors agree on long-term impact.
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Cambodia’s Land Management and Administration Project
This working paper examines the case of the World Bank supporting a project in Cambodia aimed at mass titling land. It raises important questions about the ethics of interventions, donors influence, and domestic politics.
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Using case studies to explore the external validity of ‘complex’ development interventions
An analytical framework is provided for assessing the external validity of complex development interventions. It argues for deploying case studies to better identify the conditions under which diverse outcomes are observed, focusing in particular on the salience of contextual idiosyncrasies, implementation capabilities and trajectories of change.
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Escaping Capability Traps through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
Sometimes reforms are surface level– when governments fail to actually alter the way policy works, not just what it looks like on paper, improvement isn’t possible. This working paper highlights this issue along with capability traps.
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Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation
What techniques enable states to “buy time” to enable reforms to work? How do donor and recipient countries manage to engage in the logics of “development” for so long and yet consistently acquire so little administrative capability?