Much of ‘the evidence’ is crap! You can safely ignore it! A garbage study is always more garbage than study. Even good studies can be turned into garbage by the garbage practices of everyone else. If I wanted to be extreme: no matter how well you design your study, and how carefully you document your data choices and how carefully you design your e... See more

A further practical issue is that IDA seeks to stay engaged across multiple sectors in client countries over time. E ach country’s financing package typically maintains a minimum of programming resources across agriculture, education, healt h, infrastructure, social protection, and so forth , independent of any specific assessment regarding which m... See more

A common delusion is that that the region has good policies, but implementation is the problem. In reality, implementation failures reflect poor policies borne of very low domestic policymaking capacity. Too many governments in the region merely act as implementation arms of multilaterals, foreign donors, philanthropies, and other external actors. ... See more

a big constraint to women’s empowerment is men: so if there are no men in the room, the meeting is probably not doing all it should

Discretion is disallowed because of a belief that deviation from a plan is necessarily a distortion. Impartiality is guaranteed by perfect system design, i.e., only the wisdom and impartiality of the system designer can be trusted. But few, if any, contexts are simple, uniform and controllable, which are the preconditions for allowing strict preset... See more

These are problems that can only be solved by policymakers (including program managers working for donors, IFIs, and philanthropies) reclaiming their roles as bridges between rigorous academic research and policy formulation and implementation. That means internalizing the fact that the craft of policymaking is both an art and a science. Socio-hist... See more

I had an exchange this week about the importance (indeed, primacy) of economic growth in development. I’ve had many such exchanges over the last few years, and at some point they all turn to the same point: even if this is true, what can we do about it? I used to say that growth is hard, not complicated: more like playing the trumpet than building ... See more

Ideally, philanthropies ought to have disrupted the “traditional” international development players. The entrepreneurial backgrounds of most philanthropists should have meant greater focus on private sector growth and a much higher appetite for risk taking on project design. Yet the international development “field” completely tamed these impulses,

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Unfortunately, being located in the field of international development also means that philanthropies suffer from the same pathologies as “traditional” development outfits — such as ontological solipsism, cynical paternalism, small ambitions, cyclical faddism, obsessive bean counting as an end in itself, and being used by their host governments to

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