Building State Capability

Summary

Three development scholars ask why so many government reforms achieve so little: new schools where children don’t learn, IT systems no one uses. They name the traps that hold governments back, such as copying the outward form of working institutions, and set out an alternative, Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation, in which officials craft solutions that fit their own problems.

Rationale

PDIA makes a discipline of the question we’d put to cultural experiments: where do initial hypotheses hold up, and where do they “need revising”?