In the last few days I have laid out some of the basic ideas in the book as to what I mean by limits to reform and why reform is often limited.
The limits manifest in a gap between what new systems look like and how they operate. Reforms produce new laws and procedures and organizational entities that have the right form but do not function.
This is the result of reforms being adopted as signals to garner and maintain support, especially from the international community.
Two problems with reforms that are introduced as signals relate to the context and content dimensions of the interventions: 1. Reforms are often devised without attention to context, and 2. Reforms impose specific best practices on countries; these require high content to work but reforms do not provide the content, which leaves reforms failing.
A third problem with reforms introduced as signals is that they engage agents too narrowly to succeed. Most development projects pursued by bilaterals and multilaterals, for instance, are developed on the basis of approvals by the Minister of Finance and her core team (or the equivalent). These are the ones who help to design reforms. Their approval of the reform ideas is taken to mean they 'get' the need for reform, buy in to the ideas, and have the authority to get the reform done.
According to various theories on social and organizational structure, you seldom if ever find individual agents who can do all these things. Instead, the ones who see the need for change are often not the ones who have power and authority, or the ones who can motivate and inspire the diffusion and implementation of ideas. Instead, groups of agents are required to provide all these pieces of a reform puzzle.
Where agency is narrow--as in many reforms--these groups of agents are not engaged and reforms fail at one point or another. Usually, they don't fail in the areas that the concentrated agents in a Ministry of Finance can control (writing of laws, developing new procedures, etc.) but they fail when these concentrated agents are less engaged (and distributed agents are engaged, in implementation, for instance, and diffusion of reform ideas). This is one of the reasons, I argue, why we see many better laws and processes in countries...but these don't get implemented. Narrow agency engagement, essentially, fuels gaps in reform results and fosters limits institutional reform in development.
Consider the following case brief as an example, of Ghana's anticorruption struggle (as presented in a World Bank set of resources on anti-corruption):
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWBIGOVANTCOR/Resources/gha_thechallengeofdelivery_acasestudy.pdf
The case starts by summarizing a story of reform that started off very promising--especially because a Predeint seemed to be its champion (what more could you ask?)--but turned out to be limited:
Popular desire for change swept the John Kufuor-New Patriotic Party (NPP) to election victory in December 2000 and to power on January 7, 2001. The new administration declared a commitment to fight corruption among its main priorities. It has fulfilled few of its anticorruption promises… However, very little substantial change has occurred…
The case describes the gains and limits of reform in the way I see it happening across the world: New laws are passed, with other forms, but there is limited improvement in functionality or results:
It is noticeable that most of the positive moves promised by the government to address corruption have failed to materialize - with the exception of repeal of criminal libel law, greater openness to the media, passage of the largely donor-driven and yet to be fully functional Public Procurement Act and Board, and incorporation of governance and anti-corruption reforms in PRSP
In discussing lessons learned from this experience, the case reflects on the role of the narrow leadership support it had received at the start. While recognizing that it mattered to have a strong leader in the presidency, the case notes that this was not enough--especially when the reform required real implementation. It lacked support at this stage...because the agents engaged did not have the wherewithal to make sure signals they had given were turned into practice:
Positive signals from the political leadership are central. The anti-corruption reform agenda was promising in the first year and half of Kufuor administration because the president and key officials repeated it so often that they were beginning to be taken seriously... and the encouragement from civil society and donors provided positive feedback.
Good intentions by our leaders are not enough to deliver anti-corruption reforms, political will to fight corruption is difficult to sustain in the absence of strong and sustained demand from the bottom; and top-down promises and sustained supply of anti corruption reforms must be backed by demand for official transparency and accountability.
The mini-case does not go into detail about what kinds of additional agency were needed to facilitate better implementation of the reforms. But one wonders 'who' could have been engaged to foster bottom-up demand in the bureaucracy, the parliament, and even local governments and business. Beyond this, 'who' could have been engaged to foster a design that built the anti-corruption agenda in a more measured manner, allowing political support to grow and capacity to emerge over time.
In my book I ask exactly these kinds of questions, arguing that institutional reforms will be limited if we do not know which agents are genuinely needed to effect institutional change (and when) and think through ways of mobilizing these agents to participate.