Many of the most virulent consequences of inequality are evident in South Africa’s increasingly sour, contentious and dysfunctional politics. The op-ed piece linked below gives the highlights of a paper on the subject, which I co-authored with the University of Cape Town’s Alan Hirsch and Ingrid Woolard. The paper assesses  comparatively the magnitude of South Africa’s inequality challenge,  and suggests some possible  ways forward. http://theconversation.com/the-missing-middle-of-south-africas-economic-ladder-threatens-stability-42020

The attached post by James Deane, Director of BBC Media Action’s Policy and Learning group, explores in a thoughtful, challenging way my “working with the grain” approach from the perspective of a media activist. James’ comments are an expansion of his comments as discussant for my keynote speech in Paris last week at the OECD Development Advisory Committee’s GovNet meeting….. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcmediaaction/entries/b5adf6cd-61cb-4997-aeda-0a9139fed8ad?fb_ref=Default

In a recent blog post, I introduced some data on patterns of governance change in developing democracies. The data confirm a central theme of Working with the Grain – that most developing democracies are messy, and are likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. For the overwhelming majority of developing democracies, transformational fantasies are just that – fantasies. In these messy settings,  our conventional  frameworks  of good governance and technocratic policymaking are of little use. Those of us who are committed to democratic pathways need new understandings of the way forward.

This post provides the empirical detail which I promised in the earlier post – and highlights also what the reality of democratic ‘messiness’ implies for action.  As I laid out in the earlier post – and as the attached file on MAJOR GOVERNANCE IMPROVERS 1998 to 2013   details, —  65 countries are on a democratic pathway, and  have populations in excess of 1 million, and per capita incomes which (as of 2000)  were below $10,000.  The group divides more-or-less evenly between 35  countries for which the recent period has been one of continuing (albeit often uneven) economic progress, and 30  countries that have experienced limited, if any, gains on either the institutional or economic front.  The 35 countries in turn divide into three predominant patterns.

First is a group of 13 accession (and candidate accession) countries to the European Union. This group underscores that,  for all of its current difficulties,  the EU has been a powerful positive force for the development of institutions of democracy.  Twelve countries have enjoyed both substantial economic growth and institutional improvement. (Hungary, where growth has been slower, and there has been some institutional decline, is the exception.) Indeed,  six of the twelve  (Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, and Serbia) achieved truly far-reaching institutional gains  —  though, for some of these, from a weak starting point, and  with a long road still to be travelled. But for now, with no equivalent regional candidate  anywhere on the horizon, the EU accession experience remains unique, with limited relevance for other countries.

This brings us to the second pattern – rapidly-growing democracies outside the EU zone which,  in the fifteen years from 1998 to 2013, enjoyed continuing transformational gains in governance. How many countries fit into this category?  Only two – and this by a generous count!!!!  One of these is Georgia – where strong leadership between 2004 and 2013 by elected president Mikheil Saakashvili indeed resulted in extraordinarily rapid gains in measured institutional quality  (although it must be noted that, by the tail-end, of his presidency, Saakashvili confronted increasing accusations of abuse of presidential power). The other is Liberia, where institutions remain very, very weak – but where  Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s leadership since 2005 has reversed an earlier institutional collapse, with the gains evident in the speed with which (after an initially shaky start) the country has been able to bring its ebola epidemic under control.

In sum, the EU experience aside, a review of the comparative record finds few if any countries which offer inspiration (let alone practical lessons) for complex democratic societies seeking transformational governance change. In the aftermath of an initial democratizing moment, continuing rapid institutional improvements of the kind championed by advocates of bold leadership are exceedingly rare.

So, finally, we come to the third, most prevalent group –  20 democratic countries where the quality of institutions  continues to fall far short of transformational dreams, but where economic growth has been rapid:

• Some countries in this group have managed some continuing incremental gains in institutional quality. Indonesia is a leading example. As per the data, other possible moderate governance improvers (from very different baselines) are Armenia, Sierra Leone, Turkey and Zambia. (Ukraine, prior to its recent travails, was also on the list.)
• Other countries (Ghana, for example; or, at higher levels of per capita income, Panama and Uruguay) have seen little change in institutional quality over fifteen years.
• In yet others (e.g. Bangladesh, Mongolia, Mozambique and Peru) there has been some institutional retrogression.

If one looks only at the quality of institutions few, if any, of the 20 would seem to be models of what one hoped might come in the wake of democracy. But perhaps a narrow pre-occupation with institutional quality is misplaced. What all of the countries in the group share is a sense of dynamism, of things on the move – of possibility — that can come from sustained, broad-based economic growth.

Encouragingly, as Princeton professor Dani Rodrik has laid out in detail for economic policy – and as I detail in Working with the Grain vis-a-vis governance improvement– incremental initiatives can keep forward momentum going, on both the economic and institutional fronts. We don’t need far-reaching transformational boldness of a kind which both recent historical experience and in-depth knowledge of specific country settings tells us simply is not on the cards. As long as momentum can be sustained, the private sector, civil society and middle-class actors all are likely to strengthen – and become increasingly well-positioned to push for better public services, a stronger rule of law, and greater personal freedom.

So perhaps, going forward in what promises to be another challenging year, this could be the resolution of those of us committed to democratic development: that we foreswear the seductive utopianism of transformational change, and commit instead to working in the development and governance trenches — taking satisfaction from modest gains in institutional quality; embracing inclusive economic growth which spreads benefits widely; and working more broadly to sustain forward movement (however partial it might seem). The resulting gains will surely feel uncomfortably partial – and inevitable shortfalls in relation to our imaginary visions of perfection will surely continue to pain us.

But if forward momentum can continue, then  cumulative causation increasingly can make its power felt. Decade-by-decade things will be seen to be getting better. And if  progress can be sustained for, say, a half century —  the length of time that elapsed from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the country’s late Progressive Era of the early twentieth century — then perhaps  the world can indeed turn out to have been transformed.

Ken Opalo (Stanford and Kenya’s Saturday Standard):

“I finally got to reading Brian Levy’s Working With the Grain. It is easily the most underestimated development book of 2014, and should be read alongside William Easterly’s Tyranny of Experts (which it both complements and pushes back against). ” Click on the link below to read the full review on the Africanist Perspective blog:

Working With the Grain in Development

Too often reformers treat progress toward democracy as if it were all or nothing. Here’s a plea for the messy approach. I participated in forging the good governance consensus. But I’m now convinced it is wrong. I’ve come to realize that it completely underestimates how much time and commitment are needed to transform a country’s institutions. As I argue in Working with the Grain, we need to shift our attention away from trying to achieve everything at once and focus instead on gains that can initially seem quite modest — but which, if pursued persistently, can sometimes trigger a cascading sequence of changes for the better……..

For my full post, which appeared on foreignpolicy.com on September 25, click here

Welcome!

For those of us who work at the interface between governance and development, this is an extraordinary, unsettling time. For many, many decades the pendulum of consensus-thinking has swung from one seeming solution to another.

From the 1950s-70s, there was the vision of development as a problem of finding the right ‘engineering blueprint, embodied in the almost exclusive focus during that era on investment projects. In the 1980s-90s, it was thought that all problems could be solved through the economists’ vision of ‘getting prices right’ through structural reforms. More recently, there has been the ‘good governance’ vision that the key to development was to reverse-engineer (engineering, again!!!) the institutional arrangements that prevailed in high-income countries. Each of these has contained an element of truth, but none has proven adequate to address the complexities of our uncertain early 21^st century world.

My new book, Working with the Grain, comprises an effort to cut through some of the endlessly repetitive (and increasingly stale) debates that hold us back. It is one of a series of recent contributions which explore practical alternatives. Other contributors include Matt Andrews, David Booth,  Diana Cammack, Tim Kelsall, Mushtaq Khan,  Lant Pritchett, Sue Unsworth and the Effective States and Inclusive Development research team.  While the contributions vary in their details, all share the following features in common:

• An insistence that the appropriate point of departure for engagement is with the way things actually are on the ground — not some normative vision of how they should be.
• A focus on working to solve very specific development problems – moving away from a pre-occupation with longer-term reforms of broader systems and processes, where results are long in coming and hard to discern, and where the temptation is correspondingly large to focus on changes in form for appearances sake, without necessarily any commitment to achieving practical results.
• An emphasis on ongoing learning – in recognition that no blueprint can adequately capture the complex reality of a specific setting, and thus that implementation must inevitably involve a process of iterative adaptation.

The distinguishing feature of Working with the Grain is its extended exploration of ‘good fit’.  [For more details on the book’s  approach to ‘good fit’ click here.] ‘Good fit’ offers an initial orienting framework, as a guide for helping to identify which of a broad array of alternative interventions potentially are most relevant as points of departure, across a parsimonious set of divergent country settings. The intent is not to prescribe some mechanical formula, but to provide a platform for subsequent learning.

In coming months, I will be exploring the ideas laid out in Working with the Grain with both practitioners and academics. My aim in this blog is to explore the continuing relevance of this emerging approach – with useful updates on interesting links, and some personal reflections on both immediate development and governance challenges, and on questions and issues that arise in the course of scheduled launch events.

Please feel free to add a comment on the link to the left — and/or sign up (on the above right link) if you’d like a notification whenever a new blog post of mine appears.

Warm regards,

Brian