“Folk and Formula: Fact and Fiction in Development.” Wider Lecture Series, 2013. This was an invited lecture at UNU-WIDER (video). The main point of this lecture was that a public policy is a mapping from “facts” or “states of the world” to authorized agents of the state contingent on those facts. Therefore in policy implementation there are two conceptually (and at times, but not always, procedurally) distinct steps: (i) declaration of the juridically or administratively relevant “fact” and (ii) actions by the agent. In weak (failing or flailing) states (or even in weak organizations within moderately capable states) the state loses control of the facts. Not that states don’t have reports and accounts and monitoring but that the administrative facts in these are often a complete fiction. While economists and technocrats talk a lot about “policy” if the organization tasked with implementation does not reliably keep the “administrative facts” and the real “fact facts” at least close enough then de jure policy is irrelevant to de facto actions and hence to outcomes. Moreover, when an organization does not control the facts attempting to introduce “high powered incentives” just rewards liars and this “pre-mature load bearing” makes organizational capability worse. Moreover, once state organizations have “fiction” as their “facts” then real control is not by “formula” (what agents are told to do) but by “folk” practices that become the norm. Bringing “best practice” into contexts like this can make things worse as often “best practice” is designed for strong organizations that control facts about inputs, actions, outputs and outcomes (see Doing business in a deals world: the doubly false premise of rules reform 2022).
Solutions when “the solution” is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development (2004) (with Michael Woolcock). This was a piece that was trying to draw connections amongst various trends in development projects towards “participation” and “bottom up” and “community driven development” and “decentralization.” The basic idea is that the crude “modernization” saw a meritocratic civil service bureaucracy as “the solution” so that if something, anything, needed to be done to achieve development it was just assumed that assigning that task to a “modern” bureaucracy was “how” it should be done. But often these “modern” bureaucracies ranged from inefficient (got things done, but slowly and costly), ineffective (achieved inputs but not outputs or outcomes) to outright predatory and corrupt. Our question was whether these reactions to the failure of “the solution” were really on the path to a new solution. In this paper we used the phrase “getting to Denmark” as a shorthand for the development process (which become quite popular, in part because it was used by Francis Fukuyama), but we include one of my favorite clarifications: “By “Denmark” we do not, of course, mean Denmark.”
Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization, 2009. Though this was never published except as a working paper and is not widely cited in academic literature it popularized the phrase “flailing state” as a description of a challenge India faces with implementation within government. The phrase is meant to describe the reality that it is both the case that Indian state can do amazing things–send a rocket to Mars, running free and fair elections in the largest democracy–and that at routine tasks that are “implementation intensive” (e.g. basic education, ambulatory curative care, policing, etc.) its performance is mediocre at best. The term “flailing” was distinguished from “failing” and meant that while India has spectacularly high quality people at the top of its administration, these are not reliably connected to actions on the ground (by analogy, a high quality brain that plans good things but without the nerves, tendons, muscles that can turn thought into action).
Interestingly, many of the RCT studies in India (before and since) have reinforced the challenge of the “flailing state” of getting local agents to correctly report the true “state of the world” relative to implementation and then take the correct (public purpose enhancing) action corresponding to those “facts on the ground.” Five examples of studies where one of the main findings is about how “flailing” the Indian state is:
- “Putting a Band-Aid on a Corpse” 2008 (which pre-dated and informed “flailing state”) showed that a program of incentives to induce higher attendance of health care workers was completely subverted by corruption in the administrative records of who was “absent.”
- “Improving Public Sector Management at Scale? Experimental Evidence on School Governance in India“. (2020) Found that a program intended to implement school improvement plans achieved compliance with the easily monitorable elements of the program (e.g. did the school file a school improvement plan) but zero change in any learning related behavior by supervisors, school management or teachers after that (and hence no change in outcomes).
- “Improving Police Performance in Rajasthan, India: Experimental Evidence on Incentives, Managerial Autonomy, and Training” (2021). This tried five different interventions with policy in Rajasthan. The abstract says some of the interventions were “poorly implemented” meaning that, although one of the authors (Nina Singh) was a senior person in the national India Police Service, they could not achieve sufficient compliance with the “treatment” to make “treatment” and “control” areas differ on the “treatment.” They could not even implement the intervention as an experiment.
- “Quality and Accountability in Health Care Delivery: Audit-Study Evidence from Primary Care in India” (2016). The abstract says: “We present unique audit-study evidence on health care quality in rural India, and find that most private providers lacked medical qualifications, but completed more checklist items than public providers and recommended correct treatments equally often.” In other words, highly trained doctors in their public sector practices do not outperform ‘quacks.”
- “The Devil is in the Details: The Successes and Limitations of Bureaucratic Reform in India“(2017). The experiment was to monitor data on attendance. The abstract says: “While we observed some gains from this type of monitoring program, technological solutions by themselves will not improve attendance of government staff without a willingness to use the data generated to enforce existing penalties.” The “treatment” clinics with the technologically monitored attendance had fewer people using the clinics post treatment than control.
Fragile States: Stuck in a capability trap? (with Frauke de Weijer). This paper was a background paper for the 2011 World Development Report on Violence and Development. This is the summary: “This paper addresses some of the challenges facing fragile states. The paper has four sections, each of which introduces an odd phrase. The first takes the odd phrase of isomorphic mimicry from evolutionary theory via sociologists of organizations to fragile states. It is much easier to create an organization that looks like a police force-with all the de jure forms organizational charts, ranks, uniforms, buildings, weapons-than it is to create an organization with the de facto function of enforcing the law. The second section focuses on wishful thinking; in particular, distinguishing between optimism, which can be a powerful positive force, and wishful thinking, which is not. The third section describes a key danger of wishful thinking: pre-mature load bearing. If an athlete has been injured then there has to be a period in which he/she does not put stress onto the injury. The fourth section examines whether there is a middle way out of the big stuck. The ‘big stuck’ is the combination of unfavorable domestic conditions plus unhelpful external factors that can create an environment in which fragile states remain fragile, with low capability and at risk of recurrent conflict, for a very long time. In this note authors focused on the parts of development related to administrative transformation, which is a distinct, but intertwined component of development, and particularly the administrative capability of the state.”
“A Review of Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India.” Journal of Economic Literature, 47 (3): 771-80.
The World Bank and Public Sector Management: What Next? International Review of Administrative Science.
South Sudan’s Capability Trap: Building a State with Disruptive Innovation (with Greg Larson and Peter Biar Ajak).