Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action

2017 | Book

Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock

Summary

Building State Capability book cover

Governments play a major role in the development process, constantly introducing reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don’t learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability.

This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It provides evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, analyses this evidence and identifies capability traps that hold many governments back—particularly related to isomorphic mimicry and premature load-bearing. The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. This process is explained in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers implement policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

The book is available for purchase from Oxford University Press (UKUSA) or Amazon (UK, USA). The book is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Creative Commons License

Citation

Andrews, Matthew, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock. 2017. Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action. Oxford University Press.

A Word from the Authors

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Toward a new theory and practice of building state capacity by Archon Fung

Reviews

“Building State Capability provides anyone interested in promoting development with practical advice on how to proceed—not by copying imported theoretical models, but through an iterative learning process that takes into account the messy reality of the society in question. The authors draw on their collective years of real world experience as well as abundant data and get to what is truly the essence of the development problem.”

Francis Fukuyama

Stanford University; author of State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century