Building State Capability | Blog

written by Salimah Samji

It’s February and 2018 feels like a long time ago!

Last year, I wrote my first annual stock taking blog and I’ve been meaning to write a follow up since early January, but 2019 has been off to an incredibly busy start.

As you may know, we are small team of doers who are constantly testing, learning, reflecting, and adapting our approach – essentially PDIAing our way forward, often while charting new waters. The year 2018 was very productive and rather than tell you everything we did, I thought I would highlight the 10 new things we did. Without further ado … Continue reading 10 new things we did in 2018

written by Matt Andrews

This post relates to the working paper, ‘Who Wins in the World Economy and English Football?’

The Question: ‘Can We Get Game Changing Growth?’

Governments are interested in addressing many problems. In our experience at Building State Capability (BSC), the number one problem always centers on the word ‘growth’. However, the problem is seldom as simple as ‘we are not growing’. Indeed, the vast majority of countries in the world have grown in the last generation, but policymakers we work with typically want more—especially in countries that one might call low or lower middle income.

These policymakers always ask us about the growth stories of the 60s and 70s in Singapore and South Korea, and about other East Asian Tigers. In so doing, we find them inquiring about how game changing growth happens in a country: growth that generates jobs young people actually want to do (to keep them at home), that is clean and sustainable, helps countries escape donor dependence, promotes national pride, allows sufficient income for citizens to enjoy real service access (showers in homes instead of from taps a mile away), fosters social cohesion, and more.

Most countries have not experienced this kind of game changing growth—even in the last generation’s historic global growth spurt. Rather, many countries have grown in absolute terms but stayed the same relatively—maintaining their position in a stubborn world order that does not seem to support significant change. Consider the chart below as evidence.

Continue reading Can States Promote Game Changing Growth?

We are delighted to announce that we will be offering The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results once again, from February 3 – May 19, 2019. 

This is a 15-week course for practitioners who are in the weeds of development and actually want to learn how to do PDIA. In this course you will have the opportunity to work on your nominated problem, as a team, using our tools. The course will include video lectures, required reading, assignments, reflection exercises, online discussions and group work. We estimate that the weekly effort will be between 5-8 hours. We will use the “Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action” book as the core text. You can read about how alumni of this course are using PDIA in Pakistan, Indonesia, Guinea, and the Dominican Republic.

Continue reading Registration for our free PDIA online course is now closed

written by Matt Andrews

Polls suggest that governments across the world face high levels of citizen dissatisfaction, and low levels of citizen trust. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer found, for instance, that only 43% of those surveyed trust Canada’s government. Only 15% of those surveyed trust government in South Africa, and levels are low in other countries too—including Brazil (at 24%), South Korea (28%), the United Kingdom (36%), Australia, Japan, and Malaysia (37%), Germany (38%), Russia (45%), and the United States (47%). Similar surveys find trust in government averaging only 40-45% across member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and suggest that as few as 31% and 32% of Nigerians and Liberians trust government.

There are many reasons why trust in government is deficient in so many countries, and these reasons differ from place to place. One common factor across many contexts, however, is a lack of confidence that governments can or will address key policy challenges faced by citizens.

Studies show that this confidence deficiency stems from citizen observations or experiences with past public policy failures, which promote jaundiced views of their public officials’ capabilities to deliver. Put simply, citizens lose faith in government when they observe government failing to deliver on policy promises, or to ‘get things done’. Incidentally, studies show that public officials also often lose faith in their own capabilities (and those of their organizations) when they observe, experience or participate in repeated policy implementation failures. Put simply, again, these public officials lose confidence in themselves when they repeatedly fail to ‘get things done’.

Continue reading Implementing Public Policy: Is it possible to escape the ‘Public Policy Futility’ trap?

Guest blog written by Rosie Pinnington and Iana Barenboim

In Oxford Policy Management’s DFID-funded MUVA programme, informal female market sellers have been using the PDIA-inspired fishbone diagram to diagnose their own problems. This has helped them identify the factors that limit their businesses’ growth, allowing MUVA to be led by the views and experiences of the women they seek to support. But, perhaps more importantly, it has facilitated the development of the problem-solving skills required for greater personal and professional growth amongst marginalised female market sellers. This, as one participant commented, makes the fishbone diagram “a tool for life, not just for business”. Continue reading Bottom-up PDIA and the fishbone diagram – “a tool for life, not just for business”