The challenge of building (real) state capability for implementation

Abstract

Abstract Efforts to build state capability often involve highly designed, best-practice solutions that have worked in some places and are expected to work everywhere. These sometimes work, especially when the treatment addresses problems in the policy context. Where problems are different, however, the treatment is isomorphic mimicry—it looks good but will not solve festering problems. Development organizations often ignore this, however, and offer the same solution repeatedly—hoping for different outcomes but imposing a capability trap on the policy context, which needs a new diagnosis and prescription. In some countries the treatment has a worse impact, fostering premature load bearing—where the context cannot handle what is prescribed. How can development experts identify where they will have such negative impacts, and where they need to do development differently? This chapter addresses such question, and introduces an approach to building state capability in the latter contexts, called problem-driven iterative adaptation.