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Blog
The tragedy for the Afghan people of the Taliban re-taking control of the country in August 2021 is the denouement of a process 20 years in the making. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and the national security forces over the course of a few days is not a “surprise” to anyone, but was a...
Research Brief
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The five Paris principles of effective aid were only nominally successfully implemented in the state-building process of South Sudan. While the importance of the first principle, ownership, was highlighted in development plans in Southern Sudan, capacity limitations restricted the role of the local...
Working Paper
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– The Road from the Paris Declaration to the Reality of Juba, 2005-11
During Sudan’s ‘interim period’ from the end of civil war in January 2005 until South Sudan’s independence in July 2011, foreign development agencies provided extensive support and billions of dollars in aid—for which institutional development and capacity building of the nascent Government of...
Many development initiatives fail to improve performance because they promote isomorphic mimicry—governments change what they look like, not what they do. This article proposes a new approach to doing development, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), which contrasts with standard approaches...
Research Brief
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Current development practice focuses too much on the form institutions take, at the expense of worrying about function. A focus on strict rules that aim to curb corruption and inefficiency can diminish the amount of experimentation and adaptation that is possible. The desire to have a way of visibly...
Working Paper
pdf
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. The flow...
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