Tag Archives: implementation

Abundance: The Implementation Challenge

April 30, 2026 By in governance, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In a recent podcast, a year after Abundance’s publication, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman took stock of where things stand. They largely agree that their core vision – “the promise not just of more, but more of what matters”  – has gained traction. And they remain ‘all in’ (as do I….)  on their critique of current progressive approaches to governance as doing more harm than good. However, they continue to frame the implementation challenge of getting from here to there in a way that, while useful, is ultimately too narrow –  their conversation repeatedly returns to a familiar contrast between an earlier generation of progressive success via top-down public action and a contemporary progressive pre-occupation with formal process as the way to give voice to citizens.

Implementation need not be approached in this constricted way. On the contrary, as this piece will argue, taking a more expansive view of how to make the journey from vision to action helps strengthen the case for Abundance.

For many of today’s hardest problems, the challenge is not simply to plan and then act. It is to get multiple actors to work together in settings where goals overlap but do not fully align.  Practitioners  who have spent decades working around the world on the challenge of integrating governance reform and practical strategies for improving peoples’ lives have learned the hard way that “just do it”  top-down approaches  can all-too-often be a recipe for hubris, disappointment, and subsequent cynicism.  Gradually, after repeated cycles of high ambition and dashed hopes, hard-won lessons in practicality have taken hold, and a distinctive approach to achieving results amid broader messiness has emerged. Its contours can be most clearly seen by contrasting them with more conventional approaches.

Consider two contrasting pathways to results-focused renewal: a top-down, plan-then-implement “engineering” approach, and an approach centered on problem-driven coalition-building and social learning. The pathways differ in their answers to two fundamental questions: what should be the focus of reform, and how should it be pursued?

On the question of “what”: Top-down approaches typically focus on improving formal management systems. Strengthening the institutional architecture of government is a worthy endeavor—but it gains traction only when political power is relatively coherent, and usually yields practical results only over the medium term. Where the broader context is messy (as it is in most places, most of the time), system-wide reform efforts all too easily get lost in bureaucratic minutiae and achieve little.

By contrast, a problem-driven approach provides a more immediate focal point for action. As per its champions, the approach 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.” 

(Abundance’s focus on housing, transportation, energy, and health—on “the goods needed to build a good life”—lends itself naturally to this kind of problem-focused reform.)

The contrast between the two approaches extends beyond what reforms to target to how reform is pursued. The top-down approach combines rule-centered process compliance with insulation of the public sector from ongoing interaction with civil society. This can work for logistical tasks if the political economy is supportive. But it is poorly suited to multifaceted challenges that require continual adaptation.

A problem-focused approach is ideally suited for the latter. It centers around  getting multiple actors—public agencies, different levels of government, and nongovernmental organizations—to learn to co-operate around a shared purpose, despite overlapping but not identical goals, in ways that hold together politically as well as operationally. The aim is not process for its own sake, but to build problem-focused coalitions that can align action, adapt to the unexpected, and sustain momentum over time.

Central to a problem-focused approach is the way in which it engages with power. Rather than assuming that space for reform is determined primarily through electoral outcomes, it works to expand that space through problem-level coalition-building. Some stakeholders are natural allies; others are potential spoilers, seeking to capture or undermine reform efforts. Building problem-level coalitions that are strong enough to advance shared goals—and resilient enough to withstand predation—is a core task.

This, in turn, calls for shifts in how actors interact. For civil society, it can mean setting aside—at least in part—the allure of adversarialism in favor of more collaborative engagement. For the public sector, it requires moving, in some domains, from a purely legalistic perspective toward a more deliberative mode of interaction. The latter is both  valuable in itself, and also key to enabling the kind of sustained cooperation that complex problem-solving demands.

Approaches along these lines have demonstrated their potential across a wide range of settings—from participatory health provision in Ceará, Brazil, to South Africa’s globally-renowned HIV-AIDS Treatment Action Campaign, to improvements in learning outcomes in parts of Kenya,  Peru, Ghana and Bangladesh. Within the United States, there is a rich literature on the promise and limits of collaborative governance. (See here, here and here.) Of more immediate relevance—especially given its usual status (including in Abundance) as Exhibit Number One of progressive failure—is Los Angeles’ recent and still unfolding effort to address homelessness. These efforts offer a vivid—and surprising—illustration of what can be achieved through an approach that engages complexity directly, focuses on results, and works to align fragmented actors —and what might be its limits.

In 2016 and 2017,  LA voters approved two ballot initiatives to finance homeless services and new affordable housing.  However, within a few  years it became apparent that these initiatives fell far short of what was needed.  As I detail in a piece recently published on the Persuasion platform,  in the wake of the failure of these efforts, LA’s political and civic leaders embraced  an innovative combination of hierarchical and horizontal governance reforms that, together, are transforming the region’s approach to homelessness.  Recent gains include:  The collaborative crafting and formal political approval of a set of ambitious and achievable targets for 2030;  the creation of a powerful new county-wide Department of Homeless Services and Housing; and difficult service cuts – made under fiscal pressure, but nonetheless in ways that leveraged the new horizontal governance arrangements to secure broad stakeholder acceptance.  

To be sure, what comes next is uncertain. LA has to balance unexpected fiscal stringency and the massive, ongoing needs of an effective system to combat homelessness. More efficient and effective use of resources  will be key  to finding that balance.   Whether LA’s hard-won, innovative and results-focused center can hold in the face of the adversities that are sure to come remains to be seen –  but the achievements fly in the face of the ‘punching bag’ narrative through which LA’s efforts to address homelessness generally are framed.

More broadly, when it comes to addressing ‘wicked’ problems,  top-down efforts are not enough. Without perceived fairness and credibility, even technically sound solutions can unravel – so legitimacy is central. But as is hopefully now evident,  problem-level legitimacy need not come only through  burdensome formal participatory processes or high visibility actions to hold government to account. Problem-level legitimacy   can also come from a vision of implementation centered around  cross-cutting, problem-solving coalitions. This broader perspective continues to be left out of the Abundance  discourse.  

Abundance was written with transformative intent, not to provide yet another policy manual –  it aimed to  connect viscerally as well as intellectually. By that measure, it has succeeded brilliantly. But a consequence has been that it has framed the challenge of implementation in overly narrow terms. 

Widening the aperture  by taking complexity seriously need not weigh down the message with a surfeit of detail.  On the contrary, attention to the practical can inspire – through its focus on concrete gains, its evocation of human agency and the power that can come from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to get things done. Taking the workaday seriously need not detract from  Abundance’s vision. It can align with it – and, in its practicality, enhance its potency.

Active citizenship when bureaucracies are weak – some school-level lessons from South Africa

May 3, 2017 By in governance, inclusion, institutions, Uncategorized, Working with the Grain Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Bureaucracies, we have learned, are embedded in politics. How, then, to strengthen public services in messy democracies? In settings where public hierarchies are weak, can participatory governance provide an alternative entry point? Recent results from a research project I have been leading on the politics and governance of basic education in South Africa suggest an intriguing answer. (The research is part of a  broader, global initiative sponsored by the University of Manchester-based Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) programme.)

South Africa’s Eastern Cape province provides an ideal setting for exploring these questions. As the ESID approach (laid out here) underscores,  two sets of variables that have a powerful influence on  bureaucracies  are: (i)  the inherited institutional legacy, and (ii) how elites interact with one another. On both counts, as the ESID working paper,  The governance of education in the Eastern Cape, by Zukiswa Kota, Monica Hendricks,  Eric Matambo and Vinothan Naidoo details, the Eastern Cape scores badly. The province’s bureaucracy is a patchwork, built largely around two patronage-riven structures inherited from the apartheid era. Electorally, the ANC was dominant – but in practice it comprised  an overall umbrella under which inter-elite conflict was endemic.

The combination of elite fragmentation and a personalized bureaucratic legacy left the Eastern Cape’s Department of Education (ECDoE) bedevilled by  divergent and competing regional interests, organisational cultures, and patronage ties. The national government tried to intervene, and for a few years it temporarily took over administration of the ECDoE. But this did not stem the crisis. Provincial politics proved too powerful. After a few years, intervention was scaled back, having had only limited impact on the crisis.

This brings us to the question of whether, in weak governance settings,  participatory governance could be an alternative entry point. The 1996 South African Schools Act delegates authority both to provinces and to school governing bodies (SGBs) in which the majority of positions are held by parents. In principle, this governance framework creates the potential for horizontal governance to serve as at least a partial institutional substitute for weaknesses in hierarchies. To explore this possibility,  in a second ESID working paper (School governance in a fragmented political and bureaucratic environment), Lawule Shumane and I explored in depth how governance played out over time  in four  schools in the Eastern Cape’s Butterworth district. In two of the four cases, participatory school-level governance turned out to provide a useful platform for pushing back against bureaucratic dysfunction.

In the first case, the school-level institutional culture was one where all stakeholders – teachers, the SGB, the extended community – felt included.  This inclusive culture provided a powerful platform for managing the recruitment of teachers (and, when the time came for leadership succession, of the school principal) in a way that assured a continuing commitment to the educational mission of the school. One interviewee illustrated how this participatory culture operated with the example of how new staff are inducted into the school’s organisational culture:

“The principal will call newly appointed staff to a meeting and introduce them to everyone. At this meeting the principal will welcome the new staff member to the team and inform them on school culture…. he will often say ‘Mr. or Ms. so and so, at this school we are a family and if we have problems we deal with them openly. If there is unrest, we will know it is you because it has never happened before’.”

The second case is more ambiguous.  The principal who set in motion the school’s long decline was appointed in the late 1980s, and remained in the post for over two decades. In the latter-1990s she purchased and moved to a home in a coastal town 100 kilometres away. From then on, using  one pretext or another, she was, for  much of the time an absentee principal. This continued for about a decade (!!!). The school went into a downward spiral, with the number of students falling from close to 1,000 in the early 1990s, to a low of 341 in 2011.

In 2009, frustration at the principal’s continuing absence finally boiled over. A group of parents and some SGB members met, and jointly reached the view that a new principal was needed. The ECDoE district office was not supportive. In response, the parent community blockaded the school, preventing the principal from entering. The district office kept her on as a displaced teacher, reporting to the district office, until her retirement in 2010. The SGB  subsequently selected as principal an internal candidate who had shown a commitment to try and make the school work during the grim period in its history. All, including the broader community,  worked together to try and turn things around.  Between 2011 and 2015  the number of pupils in the school rose  from 347 to 547.

To be sure, these intriguing cases do not imply that horizontal governance is a panacea in the face of bureaucratic dysfunction. Two of Levy-Shumane’s case study schools seemed trapped in a low-level equilibrium of capture, centred around the principal and teaching staff in the short term, with the collusion of the school governing body  and the broader community, reproduced via a captured process of principal selection – and with low morale, absenteeism by students and teachers and crumbling infrastructure the all-too-common consequences.  More broadly,  systematic analyses show that the impact of efforts the world over to strengthen participatory governance of schools  has been mixed.

But the Eastern Cape school-level case studies offer a key insight into why evaluations yield mixed results – and what might be a way to improve the outcomes. The key differentiator among the cases  is not  ‘capacity’.  Rather, the influence of horizontal governance on performance (for good or ill) depended on the relative influence of developmental and predatory stakeholders. Parents know whether teachers show up, and whether they bring honest effort to their work.  What matters for the efficacy of participatory, school-level governance is power.

This is where active citizenship can come in. The crucial task for initiatives aimed at strengthening horizontal governance is to help empower developmental actors within SGBs, parents and the broader community – helping to build networks that link SGBs with one another as a way of  sharing learning as to ‘good practices’, and potentially providing mutual support in the face of predatory pressures.

Support for school-level governance is no panacea. Children indeed gain when teachers improve their skills, and when schools are better resourced. However, trying to get these things by changing how bureaucracies work is, at best, a slow process. Bureaucracies are embedded in politics;  far-reaching improvements depend on very specific, and very difficult-to-achieve, political conditions.  But there also is abundant evidence that  a non-hierarchical entry point for improving educational outcomes has real potential to achieve gains – not always-and-everywhere, but in some schools, some of the time. Perhaps it is time to complement ongoing efforts to strengthen hierarchy with something different.

A somewhat different version of this piece appeared on the South African online Daily Maverick news and opinion website, under the title, “To help Eastern Cape schools, add a dose of active citizenship”

 

Doing development differently — the rebirth of ‘the science of muddling through’

December 16, 2014 By in corruption, development, governance, institutions, Working with the Grain Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

doing development differentlyIt is a commonplace that the pendulum of economic development scholarship and practice swings back and forth from one set of (faddish) ideas to another.  But beneath this back-and-forth cycling is another, longer cycle —  the tension between a search for grand, seemingly scientifically-grounded solutions, and an approach to problem-solving which self-consciously is more pragmatic, incremental. In recent decades, this long-cycle pendulum has swung powerfully in the direction of  scientism. There are, though, some striking signs that it may be swinging back. As a next step in crafting a way forward, a rapidly growing group of eminent scholars and practitioners have signed on to a “Doing Development Differently” manifesto.  I explore this swinging pendulum, and make the link to some of the earlier  intellectual roots of the DDD movement, in a blog post on the Oxford University Press website. You can access the full post by clicking here. (…..but before you go, though, do go to my blog home page, and sign up to receive email updates of future blog posts……..)