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One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Lant Pritchett on Mimicry in Development
March 14, 2011
Development is easy, right? All poor countries have to do is mimic the things that work in rich countries and they’ll evolve into fully functional states. If only it were that simple. My guest this week is Lant Pritchett, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and chair of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master’s program in international development. His latest work looks at how the basic functions of government fail to improve in some developing countries (a dynamic he defines as a “state capability trap”). Part of the problem, says Lant, is that donors often insist on transplanting institutions that work in developed countries into environments where those institutions don’t fit at all.
Despite decades of development assistance, on a wide variety of indicators of how well governments provide certain services—policing, delivering the mail, building roads, etc.—some countries are simply stuck in the mud. Lant’s work meticulously illustrates the depths of the problem. “We thought we would be able to replicate the development process very fast. We thought, these [countries] are going to develop in about 10 – 20 years,” explains Lant. “At the current rate of progress, it will take literally thousands of years for many developing countries to reach Singapore’s level of capability. That’s the capabilities trap.”
In our conversation, Lant unpacks the problems inherent in what he calls “isomorphic mimicry”: building institutions and processes in weak states that look like those found in functional states. “They pretend to do the reforms that look like the kind of reforms that successful [countries] do, but without their core underlying functionalities,” says Lant. “Instead, countries wind up with all the trappings of a capable system—institutions, agencies, and ministries—without its functionalities.”
How to break this bad habit? To start with, Lant says, the development community needs to understand that a lot of what it’s been doing hasn’t worked: “It’s just surreal, the disjunction between any grounding in what the empirical realities of the acquisition of state capabilities have been, and the way in which development plans of official organizations often assume that capabilities can be grown.” To paint a more realistic image, Lant suggests that it’s important to develop indicators that showcase real progress (and are resistant to the mere appearance of progress). In the education sector for example, instead of measuring enrollment rates, he suggests more effort to measure learning (see Charles Kenny).
Listen to the Wonkcast to hear our full conversation, including a discussion of Andy Sumner’s concept of the “New Bottom Billion” late in the interview. Have something to add? Ideas for future interviews? Post a comment below, or send me an email. If you use iTunes, you can subscribe to get new episodes delivered straight to your computer every week.
My thanks to Will McKitterick for his production assistance on the Wonkcast recording and for drafting this blog post.
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9 Responses to “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Lant Pritchett on Mimicry in Development”
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March 15th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Change is a very slow and often times ‘many steps back’ process. Additionally, I think there are many different layers of reality all working at the same time. And most of us do not know or want to discuss the other realities.
March 15th, 2011 at 4:18 pm
Appreciate Pritchett valid insights.
Trite but true, some polities will require more time than others to reach governance maturity (and that means…?). To identify programs and contexts making a difference will save resources and mobilize public will.
Yet progress achieved in countries like say, El Salvador cannot be equated with the political regression occurring in other ones (e.g., neighboring Honduras). Lackluster performance, in addition, may be also due to poor governance within the donor institutions who must show results at all costs, and quickly to their handlers.
Time is subjective. And another lesson learned: it will always take longer than originally envisioned. I still remember when, in the midst of the excitement lived during the transition away from the license Raj in India, I was asked how long would it take India to catch up with the US? My answer: if India does it right and the US wrong, about 50 years (no, although I had the numerical projections they didn’t inform the answer, do not trust governance trend lines beyond five years; 50 came from the old fashion, lousy governance knack: gut feeling). The Bengal audience of Indian executives didn’t appreciate such time line. But to change governance from the Nehru mind set to a free market framework would take time–especially at the state level and with the political alliances required in planet India. It takes time.
Experience shows countries can move out of their poverty traps quickly–South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Costa Rica–SK was described not long ago (after the Korean war) as the pit of hell, Taiwan’s prognosis was terminal, and massive poverty reigned in Franco’s Spain. Those countries’ climb out of their own poverty traps also illustrate the dimension of “quickly.”
Others are moving forward now–Cape Verde, Colombia, Ghana, South Africa, Peru, Slovakia, Brazil. True, it is not a perfect forward vector, but it is still forward.
Still others are changing the development paradigm, but not the nature of development–Vietnam, China, India, and Argentina. Unfortunately, suffering countries have predatory governments whose power might be challenged if their people were not kept ignorant, fragmented or disenfranchised–Russia, Byelorussia, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Georgia, Mexico. The last set frequently distorts the results achieved by many.
If a decision were made to exclude the despotic set, and the development funds were realigned towards the more progressive countries and their governments (e.g. with, lets say emphasis on education–countries do not have to wait for generations to harvest the fruits of better education (that happens only in economic models gauging inexistent rates of return)).
When discussing progress in governance, one immediately finds a “noble” mindset–transparency, democracy, empowerment, human rights. If angels ruled the word, there would be no need for humans. Would it be useful to find out how governments with massive operational (not legal) corruption have managed to move forward nations like Japan, the US, France, Italy and Greece? Are there tipping points, which must be reached? How does the enlightened donor community collaborate with local leaders to shift from governance models where politics is the major industry, and to eat the cow has become the only way to acquire wealth to a model where politicians are wise enough to keep the cow alive so they can milk it?
Fortunately, development occurs in a broad array of countries. Many follow the still powerful Washington Consensus and the Magna Carta (i.e., Colombia, Ghana); others opt for alternative pathways. Countries are developing, a lot more than the pay masters can acknowledge, because their constituencies would reject the notion of progress following another model–everyone is not linking their dreams to Wall Street, rigorous patent protection or GMOs. But if development is underestimated, it also underwhelms. Yesterday’s dreams–Iran, Nigeria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Venezuela, Nicaragua have failed miserably–no matter what your ideological prism. For example in Nicaragua failed both the right and the left. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nigeria and Venezuela belong to the notorious “resource curse” club. Cuba shows the costs of being run by an obsolete gerontology. Repugnantly, billions in assistance flow to Nigeria and the cruel Equatorial Guinea regime–a governance issue?
Perhaps, when discussing what has been learned in governance, donors should look at their own governance and to the contamination of their well-intended action by their values, interest and greed. Hosni Mubarak ruled so long because… No, the poor in Haiti should not to be blamed for their non-governance.
Bottom thought: good governance is crucial, or no continuous development will take place. The trick is to define “good” governance in the context where it will have to work, and then fund accordingly. Once again, the tightly governance-controlled USAID model elicits many questions. And the more autonomous MCC experiment may teach valuable lessons. The Pentagon development model is not development (relates to it like military music does to the impressionist Debussy).
Felipe P. Manteiga
US Foreign Service Officer (Ret.)
March 15th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Not sure what the takeaway is here. The history of countries like Haiti surely demonstrates that development is not inevitable. We also have cases like Argentina and Ivory Coast that demonstrate that countries can “undevelop” if sufficiently badly managed. If we agree on that, why would we want to measure the rate of development like the growth of trees? — that approach buys in to the myth of inevitable growth. It’s like measuring the speed of car with the accelerator depressed and the speed of a car in neutral. It also doesn’t matter how much gas (development investment) you put into a car in neutral– it won’t move any faster. This is the truth development organizations need to face up to. We have to find out ways for assessing whether societies have truly embraced development (put the car in gear) and then focus investments there. Rwanda has made amazing progress in a relatively short period of time because the society has embraced development and is not just going through the motions of anthropomorphic mimicry.
March 16th, 2011 at 5:14 am
I very much enjoyed listening to this.
The notion of the capability gap provides a useful bigger picture view of how long change can take, but I agree with Jeff Barnes that since change often happens in spurts, with twists and reversals in between, rather than an even growing tree, it may be more instructive to disaggregate trajectories. I wonder if Hans Rosling’s tools may help visualize this…
The truly compelling idea here is development as mimicry — that we often perform the forms of what looks like development in an OECD world without having its functions. That is why in so many countries there is such little progress, and this can be sustained because our measures for progress measure the things that do not matter much and in fact can become tautological. The education learning example Lant cites being perfect case in point (see the work of Pratham in India and Uwezo in East Africa).
David Booth, et al and the Africa Power and Politics research stream (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.....x/abstract) and the IDS Future States upside down governance paper come to mind (http://www.ids.ac.uk/go/news/a.....governance), as well as the analysis that informs the work we do (at http://www.twaweza.org).
The podcast ends with references to Cash on Delivery (of which I am a big fan with caveats), setting the right outcome measures and getting out of the way (yes!), and something quick about markets and unexpected progress made by Dalits. These make sense, but leave me hanging somewhat, hungry for a bigger story — or is the point that such meta narratives get us into trouble?
March 17th, 2011 at 10:19 am
Zimbabwe must be getting near to democratic govt. Our collapsed economy needs to be rebuilt, synchronizing with the modern global economy is essential. Reinstating only what has been destroyed will not bring about the desired result.
Mining and commercial agriculture were the bedrock on which the economy was built. How would you rate these two industries in the rebuilding process?
March 20th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
When developing-country service providers (or policy makers) are weak operationally, then setting final outcomes as targets, and conditioning financial assistance on those targets, amounts to “saying it louder.” What’s needed clearly is both the right targets and the right operational techniques.
But with respect to the donors’ role it’s a very good point that it’s difficult to verify an institution’s direction and operational issues from the outside. What this means is that the quality of insiders is essential. Without leaders and lieutenants who have both vision and technical ability, on the inside, the impact of setting standards from the outside may be mimicry at best.
Fortunately, donors can do a lot to help developing countries create institutional leadership. High-quality professional education experiences are key inputs to future leadership, and donors know how to provide those experiences: both by offering scholarships and, more effectively in the long run, by building quality into developing country universities.
If a big part of India’s population appears to be well educated geniuses, it is in no small part due to the IITs and IIMs that got good external support at their start-ups.
Prof. Pritchett’s calculations show that developing countries in “the big stuck” have, ironically, the time it takes to invest in building future leaders. High quality professional master’s degree programs are not hard for developing countries to establish with the support of external partnerships, and (as terminal degrees) they produce graduates relatively quickly.
March 23rd, 2011 at 11:11 pm
It is not just the institutions to be built (rather than “transplanted”) that needs reconsideration, but also how to do so. Typically donors compete with each other to employ the “best and brightest” locals, thereby hollowing out the public sector, to implement numerous “capacity building” projects. Such projects, however, invariably focus on transplanted institutions without regard for local constraints – they shoot too high.
For example, Timor-Leste’s nearly 500 year colonial legacy left the country bereft of capacity at every level. The UN Human Development Report lists just 16 countries in the world with lower literacy rates; half the population is unable to read or write. Only about two thirds of primary aged children attend school, down from nearly three quarters at the time of independence. These low education standards in the population at large naturally spill over into the civil service. Thirty Ministry of Finance mid-level employees at levels 3 and 4 (there are 7 grade levels in the Timorese government system) recently tested at a third grade average math proficiency. Third grade math proficiency in the Ministry of Finance! A budget preparation trainer brought in by the IMF said that more than 80% of her trainees did not understand fractions, decimals and percentages.
Capacity building projects should be merged into research-based multi-donor programmes that address the specific needs and existing capacities of particular developing countries.
March 25th, 2011 at 5:00 am
I really support the ideas of one size cannot fit all which is equivalence to the idea of putting the right policy to the right place at the right time and these theory is my research of interest. I would like to contribute two empirical evidence of one size cannot fill all, my MBA thesis in 2004 shed some light about the relative causal effect between institution and international trade impact on economic growth in the short run effect using the decadal panel data, by utilizing the combined technique of robust regression with the principle component regression technique applied for the instrumental dynamic panel regression, the result for the global level regression show that improving in international trade is more impact on growth than improving institution. But after I estimated the distribution impact by expanded the econometric specification troughs the interacting institution and trade variable with Cambodia and it similar countries group (based on k-mean cluster analysis) dummy variable the relative important of trade than institution at the global level regression is changed, in fact the result show that for Cambodia and its similar countries group improving institution is more impact on growth than improving international trade, therefore in term of priority policy decision making if we fit the result from cross country regression at the global level for Cambodia and its similar country we will make a big mistake.
One more empirical evidence in Cambodia is the result from the welfare impact of the decentralization and de-concentration policy through the commune sangkat (CS) Fund investment, the result from panel regression show that road investment is contributed more on the citizen welfare improvement than irrigation investment, but after I expanded the econometric specification narrow down to the distribution impact at sub-national level (province) the result show that while the Kampong Cham province is more benefit from road investment but Takeo province is more benefit from irrigation investment this mean that in term of priority policy if we fit the one size model based on the regression model for the average treatment effect to all provinces we will make a big mistake.
March 28th, 2011 at 4:54 am
Thanks for the interesting conversation. I was very surprised to hear references to capability traps in Afghanistan and Haiti as if they were solely a feature of domestic institutions. External actors presumably bear some, if not much, of the responsibility for the inability of governments to begin to function. Surely long histories of colonization, neocolonialism, and intervention are relevant?