Programs and ideas are a distraction in development

Arguably, the biggest distraction in development is the disproportionate importance given to the idea of designing programs or schemes to address specific problems as the primary route to development and economic growth.

It displaces attention away from the core broad issues of development and economic growth. It encourages a reductionist view of development and detracts from the processes and struggles associated with making choices and decisions in acutely resource-constrained environments.

Instead, it fixates the public system (politicians and bureaucrats, but in their different ways) on the implementation of narrowly defined inputs and activities of programs. It’s an unfortunate reality of modern development discourse since the end of colonialism that whole systems and countries have become entrapped in the pursuit of programmatic development.

This distortion has been the combined handiwork of politicians, bureaucrats, donors, and experts. The programmatic approach to the development endeavour suits them all in their different ways. The politician gets to appropriate the credit, the bureaucrat gets the comfort of being able to administer something tangible, donors know what they are funding and whether it’s achieving its objectives, experts can critique and offer new ideas about improving the design of these programs, and academicians can evaluate them.

These programs are built on a body of assumptions about the problem statements, objectives, diagnoses, and prescriptions. So, for example, in the world of programs, the issue of poor learning outcomes is dealt with primarily by building schools, hiring teachers, providing uniforms and textbooks to students, prescribing a curriculum and syllabus, conducting tests, and monitoring the implementation of all these (and now we also have providing digital devices and content). These components are brought under the umbrella of one or more programs and schemes. There’s a neatness and simplicity to this approach.

This programmatic focus sidesteps the hard public debates and tough choices and trade-offs around the expectations from education expenditures, prioritisation of scarce resources, creation of implementation capabilities, monitoring of outcomes and impact, and accountability mechanisms at different levels. Such debates tend to be anchored on the local context, its challenges, and practical issues with solutions and their implementation. Most importantly, the absence of such debates prevents ownership of education department initiatives by its primary stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and communities).

At a macro-level, it engenders critical distortions. It anchors the agenda around redistribution and expenditures, while also marginalising the focus on economic growth and resource mobilisation. It glosses over the debates about the constraints on and enablers of economic growth, and the capabilities, strategies and choices necessary to address them.

Another consequence of the program focus in development is that it crowds out the process. It’s appropriate here to point out that we consistently overestimate the importance of ideas in development when, in reality, implementation is what matters. As I have written here, there is hardly any idea in development that is truly new and innovative, and has not already been tried before at multiple places. And where they have been tried earlier, they have succeeded or failed in varying degrees depending purely on the quality of implementation.

Lack of ideas is not a constraint on the resolution of the big problems in development - sanitation and hygiene, nutrition and child health, learning outcomes and skills acquisition, lifestyle diseases, affordable housing and traffic congestion, community ownership and management, etc. Commentators and experts wax eloquent with op-eds and books prescribing ideas on every problem in the world. They are barking up the wrong tree.

The biggest variance in development is implementation. Essentially, the same things are being done across development sectors everywhere, developed and developing countries, though their success or failure varies widely, almost completely due to the nature of their implementation.

With this backdrop, a few observations:

1. The foremost requirement for sustainable and focused change is political ownership. While bureaucrats may be able to take the lead with limited infrastructural, logistical, and regulatory initiatives and reforms, systemic transformations rooted in deep behavioural and attitudinal acceptance/change cannot happen without political leadership. Such political leadership can be driven only by public demand. In simple terms, the issue must become an electoral imperative. Unfortunately, none of the problems discussed above are yet an electoral good.

2. There cannot be any meaningful effort to address complex (or wicked) public issues without ownership by the bureaucratic system, especially of the frontline bureaucracy. There must be an account or narrative that is individually and collectively internalised. Accountability must be built and shaped by this account.

3. Account-based accountability is meaningless and unsustainable without sufficient agency for bureaucrats, especially those at the frontline, given the critical importance of implementation. Besides, agency also creates ownership.

4. Effective implementation requires sufficient space for problem-solving. This space should be available at all levels of implementation, especially at the cutting-edge level where things get done. The most important requirement to create this space is a culture that allows experimentation and tolerates honest failures.

5. Effective problem-solving requires a few things. Foremost, it requires the application of an analytical framework that enables understanding and defining the problem, diagnosing its reasons, evaluating solutions, finalising and implementing a solution. Given the uncertainties involved, it must use data and evidence to monitor and guide the trajectory of implementation. Problem-solving in development should generally be seen as a never-ending iterative process, where outcomes improve gradually and continuously.

None of this should be seen as a critique of all programs. In some areas, programs are useful. Further, once the debates are had and choices are made, programs are a useful anchor for execution.