Whether understood as a long-run historical process or an intentional political project, international development transforms not only societies and economies but also key ideas about how the world works and how problems should be solved. At its best, development yields enormous benefits for human welfare, yet actually realizing and securing them is perhaps humanity's greatest challenge. In this compelling book, Michael Woolcock – Lead Social Scientist at the World Bank – demonstrates that achieving peace and prosperity for all is supremely contingent and often contentious: the means and ends of development are often perceived as alien, unjust, and disruptive, its benefits and costs unequally borne. Many development challenges are not technical problems amenable to an expert's solution, requiring instead extensive deliberation to find and fit context-specific responses. Flailing attempts to ""build the rule of law"" – perhaps the only development goal shared across the political spectrum in the global North and South – embody this central conundrum. Woolcock insists that it is each generation's challenge to find shared, legitimate, and durable solutions to the moral imperative to reduce human suffering while simultaneously redressing the vexing challenges that development success (let alone failure) inexorably brings. This skillful guide will be essential reading for students and practitioners working in this complex field, and for anyone seeking to help 'make the world a better place'.
Whether understood as a long-run historical process or an intentional political project, international development transforms not only societies and economies but also key ideas about how the world works and how problems should be solved. In this compelling book, Michael Woolcock demonstrates that achieving peace and prosperity for all is supremely contingent and often contentious: the means and ends of development are often perceived as alien, unjust, and disruptive, its benefits and costs unequally borne. Many development challenges are not technical problems amenable to an expert’s solution, but require extensive deliberation to find and fit context-specific responses. Woolcock insists that it is each generation’s challenge to find shared, legitimate, and durable solutions to the moral imperative to reduce human suffering while simultaneously redressing the challenges that development success (let alone failure) inexorably brings. This skillful guide will be essential reading for students and practitioners working in this complex field, and for anyone seeking to help “make the world a better place.”
This pathbreaking book grapples with an established reality: well-intentioned international development programs often generate local conflict, some of which escalates to violence. To understand how such conflicts can be managed peacefully, the authors have undertaken a comprehensive mixed-methods analysis of one of the world's largest participatory development projects, the highly successful Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), which was launched by the World Bank and the Indonesian government in the late 1990s and now operates in every district across Indonesia. --
The notion of empowerment has been more often deductively claimed than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. The authors define and assess empowerment through an in-depth examination of the extent to which a large community development project in rural Indonesia empowers participants (especially members of marginalized groups) through building their capacity to manage local conflict. Although the project induces conflict through its deployment of a competitive bidding process, the authors argue that, when well implemented, it can also enable otherwise unequal groups to more peacefully, equitably, and effectively engage one another. Using a mixed methods approach, they compare cases from otherwise similar treatment and control villages to shed light on the chief components of villagers' capacity to manage local conflict ..."--Page 2 of cover.
Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.
This report examines the role of incentives, trust, and engagement as critical determinants of service delivery performance in MENA countries. Focusing on education and health, the report illustrates how the weak external and internal accountability undermines policy implementation and service delivery performance and how such a cycle of poor performance can be counteracted. Case studies of local success reveal the importance of both formal and informal accountability relationships and the role of local leadership in inspiring and institutionalizing incentives toward better service delivery performance. Enhancing services for MENA citizens requires forging a stronger social contract among public servants, citizens, and service providers while empowering communities and local leaders to find 'best fit' solutions. Learning from the variations within countries, especially the outstanding local successes, can serve as a solid basis for new ideas and inspiration for improving service delivery. Such learning may help the World Bank Group and other donors as well as national and local leaders and civil society, in developing ways to enhance the trust, voice, and incentives for service delivery to meet citizens’ needs and expectations.
All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Development can promote societies where all people can thrive, but the change process can be complex, challenging, and socially contentious. Continued progress toward sustainable development is not guaranteed. The current overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, rising levels of conflict, and a global economic slowdown are inflaming long-standing challenges—exacerbating inequality and deep-rooted systemic inequities. Addressing these challenges will require social sustainability in addition to economic and environmental sustainability. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. The book emphasizes social sustainability’s four key components: social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. It posits that •Social sustainability increases when more people feel part of the development process and believe that they and their descendants will benefit from it. •Communities and societies that are more socially sustainable are more willing and able to work together to overcome challenges, deliver public goods, and allocate scarce resources in ways perceived to be legitimate and fair so that all people may thrive over time. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.
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