Introduction: A Framework for Understanding Development Success

Abstract

The American singer-songwriter Paul Simon once sang that while he would be the first to admit something going wrong, something going right in his life was apt to take him by surprise because it was ‘such an unusual sight’. Admittedly he was thinking rather more about his happy relationship with his wife than about development policy at the time, but his words still tell us something about the subject of this volume.¹ For public policy successes in developing countries — policies that have endured, met their aims and secured the acquiescence of those who initially opposed them — are also a distressingly ‘unusual sight’. This has provided fertile ground for those ‘negative academics’ (Chambers, 1983) — a category that includes most of us for at least some of the time — who, like Paul Simon, sometimes find success harder to deal with than failure; failures in development, if not the failure of development. The thumping sub-title of a book that was prominent at the time of writing is indicative here (Easterly, 2006). Such work has generated various explanations of failure. Some policies failed because they were ill conceived or poorly designed (Easterly’s analysis is that many aid programmes were bound to fail because their goals were utopian and vague). Others failed because they were resisted, unpicked and steadily undermined by groups opposed to them, or because government bureaucracies proved unable to implement them; and so it goes on.