Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure

Abstract

Many countries remain stuck in situations of low productivity (and hence lower GDP per capita and widespread poverty). This has been both well documented as a fact and has attracted many explanations, both of the deep structural causes of such stagnation as well as the more proximate mechanisms that allow and facilitate persistent slow growth. Economic growth is only one dimension of development; another is the expansion of the administrative capability of the state, the capability that allows governments to affect the course of events by implementing policies and programs. We document that many countries in the world remain in capability in which the capability of the state to implement is both severely limited and improving (if at all) only very slowly: at their current pace of progress such countries would take hundreds (if not thousands) of years to reach the levels of high capability countries. We then explore how this can be so. That is, we do not attempt to explain why countries remain in capability traps - this would require a historical, political and social analysis - and an analysis that was unique to each country. Rather we focus on how countries manage to engage in the domestic and international logics of development and yet fail to acquire capability. What are the techniques of failures? Two stand out. First, 'big development' encourage progress through importing standard responses to predetermined problems. This encourages isomorphic mimicry as a technique of failure: the adoption of the forms of other functional states and organizations which camouflages a persistent lack of function. Second, an inadequate theory of developmental change reinforces a fundamental mismatch between expectations and the actual capacity of prevailing administrative systems to implement even the most routine administrative tasks. This leads to premature load bearing in which wishful thinking about the pace of progress and unrealistic expectations about the level and rate of improvement of capability lead to stresses and demands on systems that cause capability to weaken (if not collapse). A companion paper (Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock 2010) explores how to create conditions for progress by sabotaging the techniques of failure.