Problems with international development - III

I blogged here highlighting the obsession in international development circles with new ideas and innovations and neglect of regular development interventions, and examined the reasons. I blogged here questioning the belief that there are new ideas and innovations waiting to make a transformative impact.

This post will highlight another counter-intuitive point that policies in most of development matter very little and it's mostly about implementation.

It's common place to have opinion makers blame bad policies in low income and developing countries. In reality there are very few "bad" policies. But for any policy there are "bad" implementations. Conventional wisdom overestimates the "bad" nature of policies prevailing in developing countries, the design space of policies, and the agency of policies in general to generate good development outcomes.  

As an important qualifier, I'm confining myself to the human development (or social) sectors - education, skilling, health, nutrition, sanitation, social security, livelihoods, agriculture, animal husbandry etc. I concede that policies matter critically in areas like macroeconomic management, industrial promotion, and infrastructure development. 

The landscape of policies in social sectors have rarely changed over history. For example, education requires physical inputs like schools, teachers, and textbooks, and process inputs like recruitments, trainings, pedagogy, examinations, administration, and accountability. Similarly, health care requires clinics and hospitals, equipment, medicines, health personnel and doctors, coupled with recruitments, trainings, diagnostic and treatment protocols, administration, and accountability. Agricultural extension requires list of extension officers, agricultural research, list of good practices, delivery of extension as a service. 

They have been the same across history and remain so even today across countries. Even in most developed countries today, school education and primary health care is provided by the government and the ingredients remain the same. The physical infrastructure of schools and hospitals and other inputs remain the same. The design space of the processes like recruitment modes, trainings, examinations and administration too are well known and remain the same. Where there have been experimentation with alternatives like with pedagogy, the underlying core of the alternatives (while packaged differently) too have broadly been the same over history. 

Technology is often posited as a disruptor. But, as experience and practical challenges show, in most of these sectors technology is useful only at the margins and not to leapfrog or even significantly as a substitute for any core activity. Even where technology is powerful in theory, like with education content and delivery modes, the problems of teacher intermediation and digital access divide are daunting and difficult to surmount in any meaningful manner in a short time. Or where a smartphone App delivers all the good agricultural practices and market information, human cognitive inertias and other contextual factors hinder their adoption. 

There are important and unavoidable political economy issues that in theory could be modified. For example, it would have been good if there were greater focus on outputs and outcomes instead of inputs. Or if an alternative (but already well known) recruitment mode were chosen. But there are insurmountable political economy considerations or state capability constraints behind such prioritisations and choices. Theory is no good if it cannot be adopted in practice. Then there are path dependency issues also - basic infrastructure and personnel are essential requirements to even start thinking about outcomes, even with technology teachers will have to get familiar with it before they are able to make more effective use.

Fundamentally the processes and service delivery associated with social sectors are about human engagement and behaviour change, where quality is of essence. As a sample, consider the following - ensuring classroom instruction delivers learning outcomes, people maintain sanitation at home and in public spaces, primary care is delivered effectively, protocols are followed in diagnosis and treatment, extension services lead to adoption of good practices and improves farm productivity, students are equipped with employability skills while leaving school, parents provide nutritious food for their children etc. Neither top-down diktats nor technology can be significant contributors to improving quality of service delivery, especially at scale. None of these failings are a failure of policy.

The following are the conclusions:

1. Policies are choices dictated by stage of development, resource availability, state capabilities, and most importantly, political economy. Egregiously bad policies are very rare, and when in place are conscious but unavoidable political choices. Evidence cannot change them. 

2. The design space for policies have remained largely the same over time. Technology and other innovations remain mostly marginal factors. 

3. The most important point is that policy matters far less in practice than we imagine. The challenge is to implement the policy, irrespective of the nature of the policy. It's about the implementation. Doing stuff, irrespective of its nature, is what's important in development. It's here that development falters almost universally. And it’s the realm of implementation that should become the focus of international development debates.