The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: Changing Rules for Realistic Solutions

by Matt Andrews

This book explains why many institutional reforms in developing countries have limited success and suggests ways to overcome these limits. The author argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 23, 2013

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept of this book was excellent, although it fell victim to Carpenter's 1st Law of Writing (most books should be articles; most articles should be blog posts; most blog posts should be tweets).

The thesis was that the development machine spends too much time and energy on thinking up and enacting policy reforms and not enough energy actually implementing them. Also, reforms are too often cookie-cutter international best practices, rather than starting from the actual problems within a country or region. It was a fantastic book to stumble across while working to push through a reform in a developing country government. I found all of the criticisms to be exactly on point. The criticisms are well articulated and I appreciated that the author didn't overstate his case or cast these institutions as villains.

The were two problems. One was that the book dragged on a bit longer than necessary and I had to put it down. And two, the proposed solutions weren't very compelling. The author tries to draw a distinction between reforms that were successfully implemented and those that weren't, based on supposedly different philosophies, but these arguments just aren't convincing.

All in all this was a very insightful book and it would be on my shortlist to give to those interested in development.

[Nurlan Mustafayev · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have read about institutional change especially in the context of developing countries. The key argument is that "plan and control" method applied by reform-oriented governments around the world and also by international organizations in initiating and implementing reforms are unlikely to produce improvement or better government given the uncertainty, the context & dominant political logic, non-cooperation of many stakeholders, etc. Therefore, instead of such top-down approach, PDIA approach - problem-driven iterative adaptation (strange title though) should be used. In a nutshell, this means that instead of having a fixed reform formula (e.g. implement best practices in government accounting) to apply reformers should focus on the problem instead of solution(s), involve many stakeholders, incrementally apply new ideas taking into account the local context, learn from mistakes and be flexible in changing their approaches, etc. In sum, it advocates for longterm incrementalism in public sector reform.