Governance Indicators post 2015...my take

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02/06/2015

Governance Indicators post 2015...my take

A belated welcome to 2015...sorry for being off line so long.

I thought I'd kick this year off with some links to a paper I recently wrote about governance and the post-2015 goals. Here is the link. I tried to be constructive and try to suggest how measures and targets could be useful...but any reader will see this is tough.

You see, governance targets are likely to lead to signaling and skin-deep change if they are constructed in the typical fashion--emphasizing cookie cutter processes that make countries look good. You need processes or deep adaptive change associated with the targets...as well as targets constructed around context specific, functional issues...

this will be a big ask...

Posted at 10:05 AM in Doing Development Differently, Ideas for governance indicators | Permalink

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My course at Harvard: See the series of lecture materials here

Post 2015 governance indicators...past blog posts reflecting a variety of thoughts on this topic

'is a landmark analysis that will change the way we both understand and design institutional reform.' Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, and author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Where you can order the book

Make It Stick: Challenging, informative book on learning. Really got me thinking about how I teach, learn, impart, etc.

CHECK OUT THE MOZAMBIQUE EXPERIENCE ON THE BUILDING STATE CAPABILITY WEBSITE

READ ABOUT PDIA IDEAS FOR UGANDA: Closing the gap between form and function: a new approach to institutional reform in Uganda

The World Bank doing a version of PDIA in Sierra Leone

This article draws on a variety of theories to discuss productive capabilities. I love the section on the firm, which builds on Penrose: " The firm is a collection of physical and human resources which can be deployed in a variety of ways to provide a variety of productive services. In fact, ‘the services yielded by resources are a function of the way in which they are used – exactly the same resource when used for different purposes or in different ways and in combination with different types or amounts of other resources provides a different service or set of services’ (Penrose 1959: 25). The growth process, in the Penrosian framework, is realized through the firm’s recognition and exploitation of productive opportunities, specifically of ‘all of the productive possibilities that its entrepreneurs see and can take advantage of’ (Penrose, 1959:31). As Best (1999:108) points out, ‘productive opportunities link the firm to the customer in an interactive relationship in which new product concepts are developed. The advances in productive services can extend the firm’s productive opportunities by enlarging the members’ capacity to recognize and respond to new product concept possibilities in the environment’."

Timely fault detection and diagnosis are critical matters for modern chemical plants and refineries. Traditional approaches to fault detection and diagnosis of those complex systems produce centralized models that are very difficult to maintain. In this article, we introduce a biologically inspired multi-agent model which exploits the concept of leadership; that is, when a fault is detected one agent emerges as leader and coordinates the fault classification process. The proposed model is flexible, modular, decentralized, and portable. Our experimental results show that even using simple detection and diagnosis methods, the model can achieve comparable results to those from sophisticated centralized approaches.

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Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History... Iteration is not new...but really important... a good read

I like this article on uncertainty and project management; note the discussion on learning..." In our simple model of projects, learning comes from signals that are incompatible with the project team’s predictions. As project teams monitor their projects, they must recognize that observed signals are incompatible with their model of the world and be willing to change their representation of the world either by updating the partition or the transition mapping." So learning is only possible if we know what our theory of change is (our expectations) and we have information about what is going on to see if reality departs from these expectations, and we actually adjust what we do as a result.

Diagnosing Deep Roots of Development: Johannes W. Fedderke, Robert E. Klitgaard, James P. MacMurray, Valerio Napolioni

"It is argued that in complex settings, performance management may benefit from new ways of carrying out performance management. It is suggested that performance management needs to be more agile, more decentralised and more political."

Imran Rasul and Daniel Rogger looking at infrastructure projects in Nigeria: A really interesting paper...36% of announced projects never start...

MY RECENT PAPER ON GOVERNANCE AS ENDS AND MEANS

This paper synthesizes the approach I take to looking at governance in nations states. The approach emphasizes ends as the starting point for any view of governance. (Asking about what governments do rather than how they do them). I also emphasize means; but in thinking about what it takes to produce ends, not as stand-alone factors.

MY PAST WORLD BANK MONOGRAPH ON LEADERSHIP IN DEVELOPMENT

The paper explores what it takes to make change happen in the context of development, and in particular, the role leadership plays in bringing about change. The analysis and findings conclude that leadership manifests itself in different ways in different contexts, depending on readiness, factors that shape change, and leadership opportunities. However, the key characteristics of plurality, functionality, problem orientation, and change space creation are likely to be common to all successful leadership-led change events.

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Bob Behn's latest book on performance stat was a quick and interesting read, but has details and insights that will keep me coming back for a long time. Bob writes about the performance state movement with first hand knowledge of examples. I was most taken by the views on how this management approach gets adapted to different contexts. A really good read.

Francis Fukuyama's 'Political Order and Political Decay' is a great read. It explores the emergence of states, and the role of states, and the challenges of thinking about state capability, democracy, and more across space and time.

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Rethinking Productive Investment, by Crespi, Fernandez-Arias, and Stein... I really like this volume. It blends theory and practical cases about the challenges involved in making economic transformation processes work. It is also available free!

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The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development

02/06/2015