Pockets of Effectiveness (POEs) in Africa

Abstract

Recently, research on state capacity seeks to understand instances of institutional performances and policy effectiveness in the contexts of a weak state or largely underperforming public sectors like those in Africa, hence the term Pockets of Effectiveness (POEs). This chapter presents an overview of the literature on POEs. It outlines how the research on POEs arose and how POEs are defined and measured. It establishes a lack of knowledge about political incentives to create and sustain POEs and argue for a need to analyse sector-specific incentives and how such incentives could differ in different policy areas according to whether the political costs of creating POEs in a sector would be higher than the benefits. For example, incentives to build effective agencies to regulate and tax multinational companies may be stronger in the extractive natural resource than, e.g., incentives to support a strong agriculture ministry, since the promise of revenues is stronger in the former.