Chris Blattman

Chris Blattman

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Development must be seized, through struggle. It cannot be given.

My title paraphrases Claude Ake, who was talking about democracy not development. But democracy is just one kind of institutional and organizational capacity. I rank that kind of capacity as the most important thing we know next to nothing about.

Here is a recent speech by Owen Barder worth reading. Excerpts:

Too often we think of scaling up in development like rolling a new product line across an existing series of shops. That’s the wrong model. Scaling up in development is more like building a series of separate businesses from scratch, each in a different market.

…Instead of  thinking that creating capable organisations will deliver results effectively, perhaps successful organisations are the consequence, not the cause, of success. Capability in formal organisations is what happens when successful folk practices, which evolve out of years of struggle and adaptation, are consolidated into formal processes.

He talks about a few recent papers. There is a lot of micro-level work bubbling out there on state capacities, bureaucratic development, and so forth. I think I’ve said before this is probably one of the most fruitful and important areas of political economy research out there. It’s my prediction for the next “big topic” in the field.

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