Tag Archives: abundance

‘Abundance’ and the quest for a new political order

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , 2 Comments

(Part of a series)  

What will it take to break the downward spiral of polarization in which we seem trapped? In their best-selling book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer their answer, wielding ideas as their weapon of choice.

For ideas to be truly transformative, they need to do more than persuade intellectually, they need also to connect viscerally – both in their resonance with the prevailing discourse, and in the energy they evoke among their potential champions.  Abundance has been written with that transformative intent. The book offers both a wake-up call and a positive vision.  But it largely is silent vis-à- third task, one that is key to inspiring a sense of hope, of possibility   – it does  very little to translate its positive vision into a practical, positive agenda for action. The result has been that instead of  serving as an invitation to progressives to loosen the grip of conventional ways of doing things and embark on a new quest  Abundance  has become yet another source of polarized political combat.

The blog series introduced here endeavors to fill the gap – its principal focus is how to get from here to there. A companion post (see here) lays out  an approach for moving from vision to action centered around building problem-focused coalitions among reform-minded public officials and non-governmental actors. The third and fourth posts provide empirical  illustrations of the approach (both potential and challenges). The third post explores some interactions between civil society and the public sector in democratic South Africa. The fourth post (forthcoming in January) will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.) This post sets the stage, by locating the exploration within Klein & Thompson’s broader vision of the interaction between governance and political orders.

Drawing on the work of  Gary Gerstle, Klein & Thompson define a political order as: “a ‘constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies…..that endures beyond [individual] election cycles”. Political orders don’t change simply via the promulgation of new policies or even electoral alternation. Rather: “policy is downstream of  values……What is needed is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation …..New ideas give way to new laws, new arguments and new customs. People working at all levels of society, inside and outside government, bring these ideas into their labors….”. As Gerstle puts it: “For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life”.

A story about the good life has been central to both of the political orders that shaped American politics over the past century: the New Deal order (roughly 1933 to1979) offered a vision of middle-class prosperity; its vision ran aground in the face of social conflict in the 1960s, and stagflation in the 1970s. The neoliberal political order (roughly 1980-2015) followed; it was centered around a vision of abundance fueled by unleashing the power of private entrepreneurship and the capitalist marketplace.  But by the mid-2010s, it also had reached its sell-by date – undermined by a combination of rising inequality, financial crisis, political polarization, and (in the wake of the election of Barack Obama) resurgent racism.

Klein & Thompson argue that at least since Donald Trump’s  first electoral victory in 2016 we have been living in  “A messy interregnum between political orders; a molten moment when old institutions are failing, traditional elites are flailing, and the public is casting about for a politics that feels like it is of today rather than yesterday.“ Abundance’s implicit goal is nothing less than to offer some foundational ideas for a next-generation renewal of a progressive political order.

As per its title,  the book’s  narrative about the good life’  is one of……….abundance….. but framed from a progressive perspective. Conventionally, the pathway to abundance is via the market – and the abundance that is offered is the familiar consumer cornucopia. Abundance offers something different: “We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house, and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life……… Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health. Abundance is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters….It is a determination to align our collective genius with the needs of both the planet and each other…..“

Addressing the shortages calls not only for the entrepreneurial flair of private, for-profit business, but also for the effective provision of public goods – and thus for a capable state.  But how to achieve the latter?  As their (indirect)  answer to this question, Klein & Thompson offer a wake-up call.

Alongside its positive vision, Abundance lays out a relentless  “….critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years”. (p. 211) Klein and Thompson argue that two deeply-held progressive nostrums stand in the way of achieving abundance.  There is an ‘everything bagel’ approach to governance: “At every level where liberals govern….they often add too many goals to a single project. A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all……Many of the goals are good goals. But are they good goals to include in [this] project? ….with no discussion of trade-offs….or any admission that anything asked for even represented a trade-off”. 

And there is a pre-occupation with formal process, fueled by a hyper-sensitivity to the hazard that government will all-too-easily be captured by powerful special interests. In consequence: “Liberal legalism – and through it, liberal government – has become process-obsessed rather than outcomes oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.” (pp. 90-91)

Both critiques are underpinned with a wealth of damning examples ranging from the morass of regulatory obstacles to expanding the supply of affordable housing, to hyper-cautious constraints on the financing of scientific innovation; and to the disaster of a California high speed rail project that was approved in 2008, spent close to $15 billion over the subsequent seventeen years, but has not yet laid any high speed rail track.

Beyond the very general assertion that “to pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal”, Klein &Thompson’s discussion of governance is framed almost entirely as a critique. They largely  are silent vis-à-vis the question posed at the beginning of this blog post – how to translate their positive vision into a practical, positive agenda for action?  

In his recent book, Why Nothing Works, Greg Dunkelman suggests a way to close the gap between vision and action that aligns closely with Klein & Thompson’s analysis. He frames the issue as a tension between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian approaches to governance: “When progressives perceive a challenge through the Hamiltonian lens, the movement tends to embrace solutions that will pull power up and in. When, by contrast, a problem appears born of some nefarious centralized authority, the movement argues for pushing power down and out……our (contemporary) aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.”

A seemingly obvious conclusion follows: getting things done means becoming less Jeffersonian, and more Hamiltonian – to become more willing to use top-down power to get things done. A corollary follows: stop weighing projects down with too many goals and too many processes.

But Dunkelman’s prescription is accompanied by two large vulnerabilities of its own.  The first is highlighted in a question recently posed by Francis Fukuyama: Recognizing that the formal rules of American democracy by themselves are inadequate to create a healthy democracy, how do we design new participatory institutions that are compatible with getting things done?   A companion post explores in detail a variety of possible answers to this question. The second vulnerability is one that  practitioners who have spent decades wrestling with the challenge of integrating governance reform and practical strategies for improving peoples’ lives know all-too-well – the argument that  to change anything one must change everything. Argumentation along these lines has proven to be a recipe for hubris, disappointment, and subsequent cynicism.  

Gradually, after repeated cycles of high ambition and dashed hopes, a hard-won lesson in humility has been learned. Gains on the ground generally cumulatively, step-by-step  – achieved even in the midst of broader political and institutional messiness. As the second post in this series explores, three mutually-reinforcing guideposts seem key to success: focus on problems rather than systems; champion deliberative, rather than hierarchical/ legalistic bureaucratic norms; foster coalition building that brings together non-governmental actors and those within the public bureaucracy committed to realizing the public purpose.  (Case studies in posts three and four explore some  practical implications  – both opportunities and challenges –   of applying these guideposts.)

Here, to preview, is the overarching message of this series: Transformational change does not require fixing everything, everywhere, all at once. On the contrary,  as subsequent posts will explore,  bringing attention to the practical can inspire – through   its focus on concrete gains,  its evocation of human agency and, more broadly, in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done.

Taking the workaday seriously does not detract from Abundance’s vision. It aligns with it – and, in its practicality, enhances its potency.   Indeed,  as per Klein & Thompson’s vision of a transformed political order, as subsequent posts in this series explore (and as I analyze in depth in an article for the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice), perhaps focusing activism around “the goods needed to build a good life”  has the potential to set in motion a new kind of social movement, one centered around a vision of deliberative, problem-focused partnerships between the public sector and non-governmental actors – a social movement fueled not by polarizing rage but by practical, inclusive hope.

Achieving ‘Abundance’  –  from vision to action  

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

(part of a series)

Increasingly, we seem trapped in an accelerating downward spiral of polarization, with no way out. What will it take to break the spell? In their best-selling book, Abundance, Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson seek to answer the question by leading with ideas. They lay out a compelling positive vision, accompanied by a stark wake-up call. However, they say little about how to translate their positive vision into a practical agenda for action. The resulting gap leaves the field open for their critics to presume the worst.

This post, the lead in a series that aims to build on Abundance’s hope-evoking foundation, lays out an approach for filling the vision-to-action gap.  Subsequent posts use case studies to explore how the approach introduced here plays out in practice – both the successes that have been achieved, and challenges that have arisen. But before before getting into the details of the journey from vision to action, it is helpful to briefly recapitulate Abundance’s core argument (See this preliminary stage-setting post for a more comprehensive treatment.)

In the usual political discourse,  the pathway to abundance is via the market – and the abundance that is offered is the familiar consumer cornucopia. Klein & Thompson, by contrast, offer a vision  “not just of  more, but more of what matters ”   More housing. Better public transportation. Clean, affordable energy. And a health system that works for everyone.Achieving these requires not only private entrepreneurship but also  a capable state.  Thus, Klein & Thompson suggest, “to pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal,”  However, they say very little about  what this implies in practice, and offer instead  a relentless critique of how progressive governance is prone to an excess of (performative) responsiveness, with well-meaning initiatives becoming overloaded with  too-many goals and  too-many checks on decision-making.

As Greg Dunkelman elaborates in his book Why Nothing Works, the seemingly obvious way to close the gap between vision and action is to become more willing to use top-down power  to get things done. A greater willingness to act  is indeed part of what is needed. But  a call for bold top-down institutional renewal can also become a trap – the argument that to change anything one must change everything. 

Practitioners  who have spent decades wrestling with the challenge of integrating governance reform and practical strategies for improving peoples’ lives have learned the hard way that “best practice” argumentation along these lines can all-too-often be a recipe for hubris, disappointment, and subsequent cynicism. Gradually, after repeated cycles of high ambition and dashed hopes, a hard-won lesson in humility and practicality has taken hold. Gains can be achieved even in the midst of broader governance and political messiness – not in one fell swoop, but cumulatively.

The figure below encapsulates what has been learned in the form of  two contrasting ‘models’ for fostering   results-focused renewal of government – a top-down, plan-then-implement  ‘engineering’ model, and a model centered around iterative social learning in the midst of uncertainty. (See here for an in depth technical presentation of the approach, and its provenance in the public management literature.) As the paragraphs that follow detail, the ‘models’  vary radically from one another in their answers to two fundamental  questions: “What”  should be the focus of the  reform effort?  “How”  should reform should be pursued?  Each question is considered in turn.

The difference between the two models in  the ‘what’ of reform  is captured in the top boxes in the figure  – systems-reform versus reform that focuses on the problem-level.  Improving ‘systems’ – the institutional architecture of government – is a worthy endeavor, but it yields results on the ground only over the medium term. Especially when the broader political and institutional context is messy (as it is in most places, most of the time),  reforms that aim to systematically reshuffle the bureaucratic deck can all too easily get lost in bureaucratic minutiae and end up achieving nothing.

By contrast, a problem-focus provides a compelling focal point for results-oriented action. As per its champions, it offers “…..a  ‘true north’ definition of ‘problem solved’ to guide, motivate and inspire action…. A good problem cannot be ignored, and matters to key change agents; can be broken down into easily-addressed causal elements; allows real, sequenced strategic responses.” (Note that Abundance’s  focus on housing, transportation, energy and health – on “the goods needed to build a good life” – lends itself naturally to a problem-focused approach to reform.) 

Turning to the ‘how’ of reform,  a useful point of departure for surfacing differences between the two models is a question posed by Francis Fukuyama in a recent piece  on the practical potential of Abundance.   While Fukuyama  is sympathetic both to the ideas in Abundance and to Dunkelman’s call for more top-down governance, he points to a troubling dilemma for democratic decision-making  that follows from the prescription: “Public participation is one of the thorniest issues with which modern democracies need to deal…..Public input to democratic decision-making is absolutely necessary….It has been a long time since anyone believed that the formal rules of American democracy by themselves are adequate to create a healthy democracy……But how do we design new participatory institutions to meet the conditions [….needed to get things done]? Model 1 and model 2 offer very different answers to Fukuyama’s question.

In model 1, participation plays a role on the margin, an add-on of sorts to its top-down approach to getting things done. This add-on can take one or all of a variety of forms:

  • Enhancing accountability for performance via a variety of formal checks and balances plus a range of less formal demand-side mechanisms (for example, advocacy/protest and investigative journalism).
  • Championing transparency as a way to support arms-length efforts at monitoring and enforcement.
  • Deliberative democracy – structured, time-bound mechanisms for eliciting input from citizens (see here and here).  

Note the arms-length (and sometimes adversarial) relationship between the public sector and non-governmental actors that underlies each of these. As the case study of South Africa in the third blog post in this series suggests, when underlying state capacity is strong arms-length and adversarial approaches can be effective in improving performance; but they can be counterproductive when capacity is less and citizens have become increasingly disillusioned and cynical.

Model 2’s  approach to participation is very different. The model brings non-governmental actors to center stage, not as adversaries or point-in-time deliberators, but as coalitional allies in the co-production of social value. As the figure signals, this differs from model 1 in two  far-reaching ways – in how stakeholders engage with power, and in how they interact with one another.

To begin with power,  model 1 presumes that space for reform is won and lost electorally. By contrast, in model 2  problem-level coalition-building is key to opening up space for reform. Stakeholders with an interest in the problem at hand differ  radically from one another in both their goals and in the power they can command. Some are unambiguously supportive of the social purpose associated with the coalitional endeavor. Others are predators who seek to capture for their own private purposes what the protagonists are seeking to build. Coalition-building offers a way to achieve gains via the construction of problem-focused alliances that are sufficiently strong to fend off predators who might have private and political reasons for undermining the initiatives.   

Beyond the immediate task of opening up space for reform, model 2 also  involves an ongoing shift in ways of doing things on the part of  both civil actors and reformers within government. For  civil society, a central challenge is to put aside, for  at least some problems and some key junctures in the process of change,  the allure of adversarialism and embrace a more collaborative mode of engagement with the public sector. Correspondingly, the task for the public sector is to shift, in at least in some domains of activity, from a legalistic to a deliberative mode of engagement – valuable both in itself and as key to working collaboratively with civil society.    (The third blog post in this series explores the opportunities and challenges associated with making this shift, centered around a recent in-depth analysis of interactions between civil society and the public sector in democratic South Africa. The fourth post (forthcoming in January) will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.) 

In his award-winning 2022 comparative analysis of the performance of education systems in two Indian states, Making Bureaucracy Work. Akshay Mangla captures the essence of the difference between how legalistic/hierarchical  and deliberative bureaucracies do things. As he puts it:

“Legalistic bureaucracy urges fidelity to administrative rules and procedures….The ideal-typical Weberian state motivates bureaucrats to set aside their private interests and advance the public good…by insulating bureaucrats from political pressures and instilling a commitment to rational-legal norms….Bureaucrats are judged for following rules and not for the consequences that emanate from their actions….”

By contrast: “Deliberative  bureaucracy promotes flexibility and problem-solving….it induces a participatory dynamic that urges officials to negotiate policy problems through discussion and adjust their outlooks to shifting circumstances….  It is found to have made a decisive impact with respect to literacy and the quality of education policy…  It enables state officials to undertake complex tasks, co-ordinate with society and adapt policies to local needs, yielding higher quality education services.”

As Mangla details using the example of basic education, legalistic bureaucracy is more effective in addressing logistical tasks (eg building schools);  deliberative bureaucracy is better at  addressing complex tasks that require ongoing adaptation (eg improving learning outcomes and multi-dimensional challenges such as reducing homelessness).

Embracing problem-focused coalitions rather than insulating government from civil society comes with risks: the risks of reproducing performative progressivism that inhibits action; the risks of capture. But risks can be managed and,  as argued earlier, these risks need to be set against the hazards of hubris, stasis and disillusion –  of bold-sounding reforms that lead nowhere. There is risk and opportunity in all directions. Both/and is the way forward.

In sum, stepping back from the details of the two models,  transformational change does not require fixing everything, everywhere, all at once. On the contrary,  bringing attention to the practical can inspire in its focus on concrete gains, in its evocation of human agency, and in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done. Taking the workaday seriously does not detract from Abundance’s vision, it aligns with it – and, in its practicality, gives it greater potency.

Perhaps even more may be possible. In the spirit with which Klein & Thompson wrote Abundance  (see the companion stage-setting post) might problem-level gains provide a platform for a broader transformation of the interface between citizens and public officials?  Might forward-looking political leaders embrace an electoral and governance platform centred around a problem-focused vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors to deliver “more of what matters to build a good life”? This would, of course,  be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses that thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature.  But, as Robert Putnam explored in his 2020 book The Upswing,   it happened in the USA between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it could happen again: 

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship …Progressive Era innovations were seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety… National leadership came after sustained, widespread citizen engagement….. A [new] upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Problem-focused coalitional governance in action – three case studies

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

(Abundance series #3)

Ideas can help break an accelerating downward spiral of polarization by offering inspiration – but to be credible, a positive vision also needs to be accompanied by a practical agenda for action. Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s best-selling book, Abundance offers a compelling positive vision along with a sharp wake-up call for progressive governance. But it largely leaves unresolved how that vision can become a strategy for action.

This post explores that question through three linked mini- case studies which focus on one central dimension of problem-focused coalitional governance: how civil society engages at the level of concrete problems – and how different modes of engagement shape outcomes. The three cases are:

  • Mini-case study #1 explores how ongoing, adaptive engagement by civil society has been key to South Africa’s reversal of a disastrous HIV/AIDS pandemic  – a decade-long high-profile adversarial campaign was followed by  sustained efforts to work more coalitionally with reformers within government to help strengthen both policymaking and implementation.
  • Mini-case study #2  explores how problem-focused coalitional governance helped improve learning outcomes in a half-dozen countries, even in the face of broader governance messiness.
  • Mini-case study #3  explores how a disproportionate emphasis on hierarchical, arms-length and adversarial modes of engagement has constrained national, subnational and school-level  efforts to improve learning outcomes in South Africa.  

The mini-case studies draw on a chapter, co-authored with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood, in a just-published book, The State of the South African State, plus a decade of prior comparative research on the political economy of education sector reform.

Together with two companion essays, this piece forms part of a short series that probes how to close the gap between vision and action.  A stage-setting post  situates Abundance within the larger arc of literature on political orders, and highlights both the book’s positive vision and its critique of progressive governance. A companion conceptual post (see here) lays out a framework centered around the collective efforts of coalitions of reform-oriented public officials and non-governmental actors to address concrete problems. (A fourth post, forthcoming in January, will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.)

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Mini case study #1: South Africa’s HIV-AIDS Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (Click here for access to the Levy-Heywood case study;  Heywood has played a leadership role in the TAC since its inception.)

The TAC is an extraordinary example of successful activism on the part of civil society: “Upon the TAC’s formation in 1998, no person living with AIDS was receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment in the public health sector and almost all infected people died….. [A decade later, South Africa began to roll out what has become….]  the largest HIV treatment program in the world, now covering over 5.8 million people and nearly 80 per cent of the eight million people living with HIV in South Africa.   Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of this programs results has been a rise in life expectancy of more than a decade for men and women and a massive drop in infant mortality due to HIV infection.”

The case study explores the interplay between adversarial and coalitional strategies over the TAC’s quarter century of effort: “The TAC’s history can be divided into two parts: a period of confrontation over government policy and President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism (1998–2007); and a coalitional period (and when deemed necessary, confrontation and/or challenge), working with committed public officials over implementation of a policy that TAC eventually managed to co-create with the government (2007 to the present).”

The first period was characterized by: “….almost a decade of intense conflict between TAC and the government over its policy, particularly its refusal to include a treatment component to HIV prevention and care….This first period was bitter and divisive……

Eventually, government responded to pressure from the TAC (and broader disquiet , including from within the ANC, with the prevailing policies): In late 2006/7, the TAC delegated several of its leaders to work with the Office of the Deputy President to develop a new framework for a National Strategic Plan on HIV….agreement was reached in early 2007….. Key TAC leaders were appointed to senior positions in the South African National AIDS Council, SANAC  (a body that had been set up by President Mbeki in 1999), where they worked closely with government. For a period SANAC became a forum for de facto co-governance of the AIDS response.

From 2007 onwards, there was a far-reaching transformation in how government and civil society engaged with each other: “The TAC offered public servants in the Health Department a vision of care and treatment that provided hope, encouraged innovation and inspired (rather than commanded) performance…… Through its branches, TAC assessed the actual state of delivery on the ground and frequently allied with local health workers. It was central to setting up organizations like the Stop Stockouts Project which monitors the availability of essential healthcare medicines and children’s vaccines…..The TAC tackled the serious stigma that surrounds HIV infection by building hundreds of branches for people living with HIV. Its branches were conduits for its pioneering program of ‘treatment literacy’ carried out with the guidance and support of health professionals.”

South Africa’s approach to addressing HIV-AIDS had shifted from accelerating disaster to an exemplar of what coalitional,  learning-oriented and deliberative governance can achieve – a ‘best practice’ case that paralleled the primary health care reforms in the Brazilian state of Ceara, documented by Judith Tendler in her classic book, Good Government in the Tropics.  (Note, though that, as mini-case-study #3 will explore further, an embrace of coalitional engagement has been more the exception than the rule in democratic South Africa.)

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Mini case study #2: improving learning outcomes in middle income countries.

The second mini-case study draws on a synthesis of a dozen country studies of  the politics of education policy reform and implementation written for the Research Programme on Improving Systems of Education (RISE).  What follows highlights some striking (and paradoxical when considered through a conventional lens) findings on how problem-focused coalitional governance added value at each of national, provincial, district and school levels.

At national level:

A comparison of the case studies of education sector governance in  Chile and Peru points to both some limitations of top-down governance, and some strengths of problem-focused coalitions. In Chile,  interactions among stakeholders largely were top-down and systematically managed, yet improvements in learning outcomes were modest.  By contrast,Peru achieved large gains in learning outcomes, even though it has long had to navigate an extraordinarily turbulent political and institutional environment – including an education sector led by 20 ministers in 25 years. As the Peru country case study  explored in depth,  Peru’s messier, less formalistic and more iterative process of policy formulation and adaptation helped build broad legitimacy among stakeholders:

“ Civil society organizations – NGOs, universities, think tanks and research centers – have also played a key role in defining policy agendas [and….]  in the development of education policies and reforms. Though agreements are often ignored by ministerial administrations and political parties,   they have certainly contributed to the continuity of agendas and to the advancement, through piecemeal, of reforms.”

At provincial level

In his award-winning 2022 book, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India  Akshay Mangla distinguishes conceptually between legalistic and deliberative bureaucracies, and analyzes the strengths and weakness of each in improving learning outcomes in two Indian states:

“Legalistic bureaucracy in Uttar Pradesh has promoted gains in primary school enrollment and infrastructure…. enabling officials to resist political interference when providing inputs to schools…..[But] local administration’s adherence to rules imposed administrative burdens…. Cumulatively, these processes contributed to low quality education….”

By contrast, in Himachal Pradesh, deliberative norms and participatory/coalitional governance have been mutually reinforcing. “At independence, Himachal Pradesh was among India’s least literate states…. HP is now among India’s leading states with respect to literacy and primary education policy education indicators….. Deliberative bureaucracy is found to have made a decisive impact…  enabling state officials to undertake complex tasks, co-ordinate with society and adapt policies to local needs, yielding higher quality education services.”

At district level.

Ghana and Bangladesh  illustrate how local coalitions helped improve learning outcomes, even in the face of broader systemic weaknesses. In Ghana, interactions between decentralization and clientelism added to the incoherence and politicisation of the education sector. But there was a silver lining: “The drivers of improved performance and accountability do not flow from the national to the local level, but instead have to be regenerated at the level of districts and schools…. In [some] districts…. there was evidence of the emergence of a developmental coalition between community, school and district-level actors….including ‘political officials and teacher unions…..evident at district level, and mirrored at the community level.”

Similarly: “Bangladesh features an education system which, while formally highly centralized, is in practice fairly decentralized and discretionary in whether and how it implements reforms….. Learning reforms were adopted and implemented to the extent that the relationship between school authorities, the local elites involved in school governance, and the wider community aligned behind improved teacher and student performance.”

At school level

Kenya’s long history of involving parents and communities in the governance of schools has had far-reaching consequences. As a long-standing observer of the system reported: “What one sees is an expectation for kids to learn and be able to have basic skills…. Exam results are…. posted in every school and over time so that trends can be seen. Head teachers are held accountable for those results to the extent of being paraded around the community if they did well or literally ban from school and kicked out of the community if they did badly.”

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Mini case study #3: South Africa’s fraught efforts to improve learning outcomes.

Notwithstanding the encouraging examples in mini-case-study #2, many education systems seem stuck in low-level equilibria, with repeated fruitless attempts to improve poor learning outcomes by doubling down on top-down, legalistic reforms.  Heywood and Levy’s second case study (which draws on Levy et. al, 2018) explores the balance between adversarial/legalistic and coalitional/deliberative approaches at each of national, provincial and school-levels. 

At national-level: “South Africa’s education sector stakeholders (inside and outside of government)  have failed to co-operate sufficiently to be able to bring about effective change. Part of the reason for this failure can be traced to more general societal pre-occupations with adversarial civil society approaches and bureaucratic insulation. [Examples include]:

  •  A failure among experts to constructively work through their disagreements has been an important part of why the country has repeatedly failed to put in place any systematic assessments of learning before the end of twelfth grade……
  • South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) has almost uniformly been demonized by sector professionals, media and many politicians as disruptive and as a principal cause of the sector’s failures even though, as with teachers’ unions everywhere, SADTU has to navigate inherent tensions between its role as an advocate of the material interests of teachers and its role as a professional organization. Coalitional approaches would include efforts to build common cause with teachers committed to the more professional parts of this dual identity….”

At subnational-level: “Civil society’s default mode of engagement at provincial level often has been adversarial. Yet judicial victories and resulting court-imposed obligations to improve infrastructure have limited potential for impact [in those provinces]  where bureaucracies lack the legalistic/logistical capacity for follow-through.”

At school-level: The 1996 South African Schools Act (SASA)  included reforms that gave far-reaching authority to school governing bodies in which parents were the majority. These reforms were motivated in part by the liberatory impulses of grass-roots democratic movements, and in part by the concerns of apartheid-era elites about how schools would be governed. The latter has enabled public schools serving (now more multi-racial) elites to perform well. By contrast:

“While a few exemplary civil society organizations work collaboratively at school and community levels, there has been little sustained effort to breathe life into the SASA architecture within low-income communities….. We [Heywood and Levy] recognize that, outside elite settings, it can be difficult for parents and communities to exercise their voices…but it is not the practical challenges facing civil society that account for the lack of attention paid to the possibilities for inclusive governance created by SASA. Rather, it is the ideational lens through which South Africans approach the role of civil society in public service provision.”

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As the mixed response to Abundance reveals, efforts to translate a positive vision into a practical agenda for change seem repeatedly to become snarled in binary either/or discourses. The reasons seem rooted less in evidence than in competing ideational ‘priors’ – in this instance a ‘high modernist’ perspective that top-down institutional engineering is necessary and sufficient to effect change,  versus a ‘social justice’ perspective centered around mobilizing against unjust and corrupt elites.

The case studies in this blog post (and the conceptual framework laid out in a companion post) point towards a hopeful third possibility – namely that bringing attention to the practical can inspire in its focus on concrete gains, in its evocation of human agency, and in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done. As Heywood & Levy argue, what to prioritize varies by place and time.

Here is how we open our chapter: “Civil society played a key role in the struggle to end apartheid. In the first three decades of South Africa’s democracy, civil society’s continuing efforts to hold government to account have yielded some massive, vital victories. But times have changed……” 

Here is how we conclude: “A crucial, continuing challenge for the South African state is to renew a sense of hope and possibility. Highlighting failures and mobilizing around them  does not renew hope – on the contrary, it can risk deepening disillusionment. The times call not for deepening confrontation, but for a mode of social mobilization on the part of civil society that fosters, rather than undercuts, a sense of solidarity and shared purpose.”

The above is not relevant only to South Africa.  The contemporary USA finds itself trapped in its own downward spiral of disillusionment and polarization.  In Abundance, Klein & Thompson offer acounter- vision that is intended to inspire. This, they  suggest, will require a state that is both capable and willing to act. But as a vibrant recent literature (synthesized here) has explored, effectiveness alone is not sufficient to renew civic perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain. n his 2020 book, The Upswing, Robert Putnam sought to draw lessons for the contemporary USA from the 1880s and the 1920s: 

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship …Progressive Era innovations were seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety… National leadership came after sustained, widespread citizen engagement….. A [new] upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Perhaps the ideas and experiences laid out in this blog series can contribute in a small way to setting aside either/or polarities and embracing a similarly inclusive vision of change.

Hope in the dark? LA’s bold governance reforms to address homelessness

October 1, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The drumbeat of dispiriting daily news makes it difficult to look beyond immediate crisis. Where to find hope? Los Angeles’ ongoing homelessness crisis might seem an especially unlikely place to look. As explored in detail here, every night nearly 50,000 people sleep unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles County, and every year well over 60,000 people become newly homeless   – and the Trump administration’s efforts to shred the safety net threaten to make things much worse, soon.  Even so, as USC professor Yan Tang and I detail in a recent article in the National Civic Review,  a close look at how LA is addressing homelessness offers some unexpectedly good news.

“Populists don’t just feed on socio-economic discontent. They feed on ineffective government” Ezra Klein and Derick Thompson argue in their bestselling book, Abundance, quoting two eminent scholars.  Klein and Thompson highlight failures in LA’s response to its twin crises of homelessness and a massive shortfall of affordable housing as exhibit number one in a broader indictment of progressive governance. But things have moved on. [Author’s note: This post was written prior to my recent ‘Achieving Abundance blog series; an updated version that explores in detail the links between homelessness in LA and the arguments laid out in that series will be forthcoming in a few weeks.]

As the Levy-Tang National Civic Review article details, the LA region’s  recent efforts to address homelessness  include some bold,  largely unheralded, but innovative and potentially transformative  governance reforms. These reforms, the article argues,  have the potential to provide a platform for far-reaching improvements in the effectiveness  of the LA region’s efforts to address its homelessness crisis.

Some of the governance reforms aim to bring more top-down coherence to how hierarchical authority is exercised. Others aim to foster greater horizontal alignment across jurisdictions and service providers.  The top-down reforms  are moving forward at breakneck speed – a new, consolidated Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, is scheduled to open on January 1, 2026.  Yet one can readily imagine a scenario in which, rather than embracing the possibilities of the new institutional environment, many of the multiple public and non-profit organizations working to address homelessness outside the umbrella of the new  department could become pre-occupied with fending for themselves.

The “horizontal”  governance reforms – the creation of two new multistakeholder bodies to support better alignment of approaches to homelessness across the LA region – potentially could address the risk of balkanization.   The county-wide adoption earlier this year of a set of top-line goals for reducing homelessness formulated by the two bodies points to their potential. However, unlike the new department, the multistakeholder bodies lack any obvious and established champion. While they are making substantial progress in clarifying and consolidating their roles going forward, the risk remains that the painstakingly constructed shared vision that led to their emergence could all-too-easily be washed away by the crises (and parochial interests) of the moment.

Indeed, if they are to succeed, the new governance arrangements will need to hit the ground running and successfully confront what is shaping up as a potentially massive  fiscal crisis. Addressing homelessness effectively takes resources: resources for support services, resources to help the most vulnerable pay their rents, and resources to expand the supply of affordable housing. In LA,  these costs are exacerbated not only by the number of people who are homeless,  but by decades of income stagnation for the bottom half of its residents on the one hand, and rising rents (fueled by an undersupply of housing) on the other.

A recent ballot initiative approved by voters raises about $1 billion annually (via increases in local sales taxes) to combat homelessness. One third of the resources is earmarked for a new initiative to build more affordable housing. The remaining two-thirds  replenish earlier (now expired) commitments – and are barely enough to sustain existing programs.  Even in the absence of the Trump cuts, the system already was overstretched. Current Trump administration budget proposals (some of which have so far been somewhat restrained by budget committees in the House and Senate)  include billions of dollars of further cuts  in rental assistance, in permanent housing support, in  Medicaid-funded housing for health initiatives, and in food stamps and other safety net programs. In the context of a regional economic slowdown and the already-extreme economic vulnerability of LA’s low-income earners, shredding the safety net could result in a tsunami of new homelessness.

What, then, is the balance between good news and bad news? It seems certain that bad news lies immediately ahead. Recent gains in reducing the number of people living on the streets will almost surely be reversed. Increases in homelessness could be large. Fiscal pressures will worsen. Daunting strategic decisions lie ahead. The new governance arrangements confront a trial by fire, even as they have barely left the starting gate.

But the following also is true: Prior to the recent reforms, LA’s governance arrangements to address homelessness were characterized by low trust, ambiguous authority, and the absence of any coherent ways of fostering co-operation and holding the system to account. As the National Civic Review article explores, the new arrangements address these weaknesses. They may not survive the trial that lies ahead, but they have a fighting chance.  Sometimes, crisis and adversity can focus effort in inspiring ways.  

Coming months will tell. Watch this space for updates.

From crisis to renewal? Affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles

April 16, 2025 By in affordable housing, homelessness, Los Angeles, participation, public sector governance Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In dark times, I take inspiration from the great social scientist Albert Hirschman’s commitment to  the search for ‘a bias for hope’, for  “avenues of escape from exaggerated notions of absolute obstacles…. avenues in  which the inventiveness of history  and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors”. Viewed from this perspective, the point of departure for effective action is not some idealized vision of how things should be, but  clarity  as to how things actually are – with this clarity providing the basis for a search for practical entry points capable of setting far-reaching cumulative change in motion.  This passion for the possible has inspired my research and practice for almost a half century; it is the guiding spirit of a new  cycle of research on the Los Angeles’ region’s twin crises of homelessness and scarcity of affordable housing (AHHLA)  that I introduce in this piece.

Los Angeles’ AHHLA crisis startles. LA County is among the world’s affluent locales, with a  2023 per capita income of over $78,000, well above the American average. Yet that same year about 55,000 people were living on LA’s streets, and over 30,000 of them had been there for more than one year.  Even more startling, every year about 60,000 people become newly homeless –  a cumulative total over five years of almost 3 percent of LA County’s population of 10 million.  For those who live in Los Angeles (among whom, having moved here in 2023, I now count myself) the AHHLA crisis is existential. But its significance goes beyond the local.

As recent books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025) and Marc Dunkelman (2025) explore in depth, a broad national reckoning is underway to assess both how failures of progressive governance contributed to the rise of toxic populism, and what might be the contours of a renewed and effective progressivism.  AHHLA is ground zero of this broader crisis of contemporary American progressivism. In what ways did decades of progressive good intentions gone wrong fuel LA’s current crisis? Are there hopeful lessons to be learned from recent efforts to address AHHLA about how progressive approaches to governance can become part of the solution?

Here, to set the stage for addressing the above questions,  is AHHLA’s economic backdrop:

  • Over the past four decades, even as the affluent have thrived,  earnings have been stagnant for the poorer half of LA’s population. As of the early 2020s, 16.6 percent of LA residents lived below baseline (rent-adjusted) measures of absolute poverty – the highest percentage among California’s regions. (California is the state with the highest percentage in the USA.) In the absence of the public safety net, the LA percentage would be 26%.
  • Beginning in the 1990s, a combination of population growth, the end of the extensive margin and slow growth environmentalism/NIMBYism has resulted in an increasingly severe shortage of housing. Between 1960 and 1990, about  200,000 housing units were built each decade; between 1990 and 2020,  the decadal average was below 75,000 units. In 2023, 45 percent of the households that earn below LA County’s median income paid more than half their income in rent.
  • The unit costs of building publicly-subsidized affordable housing in Los Angeles are almost two and a half times the equivalent costs in Colorado and Texas; startlingly, within LA the total development costs per square foot are 50 percent higher for publicly-subsidized  than for unsubsidized, market rate housing built for private (self-pay) buyers.

Considered together, the combination of stagnant incomes, rising unit costs and a near cessation of new housing construction (except at the more affluent end of the market) was to make accommodation increasingly unaffordable for lower-income Angelenos. In important part, and as per the title of an influential book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem. More on all of this in coming weeks and months.

LA’s fragmented  governance arrangements have enabled the AHHLA crisis to fester. This fragmentation  is especially ill-suited to addressing homelessness – a multi-faceted ‘wicked’ problem  that calls for a multi-sectoral, multi-jurisdictional and multistakeholder  response. The roots of LA’s fragmented governance can be traced back (at least in part; racial ‘redlining’ also played a role….) to a century-long aspiration to avoid centralized, urban machine politics and cultivate instead more localized, small-town-like governance.  Some tasks are the responsibility of LA County government, and others are diffused among the County’s 88 municipalities, of which the City of LA (with a population of four million) is the largest. This fragmentation has been exacerbated by deepening commitment over the past half-century to open, often legally-mandated public deliberative processes in advance of any action, which further complicates local government’s decision-making.  

Moving towards more top-down governance (of varying degrees of draconianism) offers one possible response to fragmentation.  But widening the distance between citizens and local government risks worsening what already is a crisis of civic alienation from government in many countries (not least of which the USA) the world over. Might there be a third way, one that finesses the traps of top-down governance accompanied by citizen alienation, or civic participation plus ineffectual governance? 

In recent conceptual work (see here for an introductory overview), I have explored the potential and limits of this third way. The articles delineate three distinct channels through which ‘socially-embedded’ approaches to public governance might simultaneously  counter fragmentation, encourage participation  and enhance effectiveness:

  • A collective effort to enhance clarity as to goals;
  • Streamlined, transparent  and participatory approaches to performance monitoring; and
  • Collaborative, multistakeholder arrangements for service provision.

Recent initiatives in LA to reduce homelessness incorporate all three channels. Why these initiatives were adopted,, and whether they will continue to unfold in ways that contribute to reducing homelessness is the focus of an ongoing research project in collaboration with  the University of Southern California’s Professor Yan Tang (an eminent scholar in the tradition of Elinor Ostrom’s work on collective action). As our research will explore, one key to success is whether the protagonists in the LA efforts will be able to craft a credible way of sharing gains and burdens within a framework that can advance the collective interest. What follows will hopefully whet the reader’s appetite for the research project.  

Strikingly, at least since the early 2010s,  momentum for scaling-up and reshaping how LA responds to its homelessness crisis has come less from government than from civil society. The efforts have unfolded in two phases. In a first phase, political and civic leaders championed a series of ballot measures that successfully raised billions of dollars to address AHHLA. However, by the late 2010s, there was a dawning realization that the magnitude of the challenge went way beyond earlier perceptions. Not only was further financing required, effectively addressing the twin crises called for better  co-operation among multiple stakeholders – something that the region’s fragmented institutions were not well placed to achieve.  A 2021 report commissioned by civil society champions took stock of the governance challenges, and proposed a menu of reforms. Partly in response to this report, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors  established a Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness Governance  and subsequently adopted its recommendations.

Since mid-2024, there has been an extraordinary burst of energy and  reform aimed at aligning LA’s multiple stakeholders  around a coherent governance platform for reducing homelessness. Major initiatives include:

  • The creation by LA County’s Board of Supervisors of a robust, formally-empowered multistakeholder platform, with a mandate to “help align the region’s approach to homelessness and provide critical accountability and oversight to ensure more meaningful results”.  
  • The  development and official adoption of specific, measurable targets for reducing  homelessness.  
  • The initiation of work by  the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), established in a 2022 resolution of the California State Senate to increase the availability and affordability of housing in LA.
  • A radical restructuring (currently at an early stage, but on an accelerated timetable)  of the lead public  LA County and City agencies responsible for overseeing and implementing the LA region’s response.
  • A new effort to specify performance standards for each of the many elements that go into the homelessness response – as a necessary basis for both resource allocation and accountability.

The hope is that the above initiatives will together finally provide the coherence and momentum needed to make real inroads into  homelessness – and thereby  break a longstanding corrosive cycle of overpromising and then underdelivering.  Whether this will happen remains uncertain,  but if it does  LA could go from being seen as a notorious example of the failure of well-intentioned progressivism to effectively address urgent social challenges, to  becoming an exemplar of a renewed, legitimate and effective 21st century progressivism. What happens next thus matters well beyond LA itself.  Watch this space for further updates.