Everything-bagel development
Rather than jumping to ambitious programmes with many complex objectives, low-income countries should incrementally build their capacity through successfully implementing targeted policies.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote recently about a phenomenon he calls “everything-bagel liberalism”. The problem he sees with progressive policymaking in the US is that each project tries to achieve too much. He cites the examples of construction and semi-conductors. Government initiatives to build more affordable housing or expand semi-conductor production are dragged down by the need for each project to also directly contribute to other – unrelated – progressive goals.
While Klein writes about this exclusively in the US context, might there be a similar phenomenon holding back effective policymaking in low-income countries – something that could be called “everything-bagel development”?
Government strategies in low-income countries are usually hugely ambitious. Even for seemingly small issues, strategy documents can run to hundreds of pages. This is partly related to the way policymaking is done in low-income countries (and indeed often in middle- and high-income countries too). In what we might generously call “sectoral engagement”, government departments work with a long list of interest groups – apex bodies, regulators, consumer associations, even other departments and agencies – in the design phase of a policy or strategy. Each of these organisations want to have their say and see their objectives included.
Another driving force of everything-bagel development is that donors themselves often have long lists of organisational priorities. Funding and support for development projects are thus channelled according to these priorities. Governments skilled at winning budgetary support – either in general terms or for specific projects – will make sure their policies include objectives that speak to these priorities.
The result can be a seemingly endless list of goals for each policy initiative. Every time a government wants to do something it ends up trying to do everything. Even when these myriad objectives don’t directly compete with each other, they add complexity. This is particularly damaging in the low-income country context where state capacity is low.
What’s more, donors often demand the inclusion of best practise policies that take little account of the context of low-income countries. This can stretch from small scale projects at the bottom, right up to the structural adjustment programmes insisted upon by agencies such as the IMF and World Bank. Complicated programmes that have been successful in rich countries thus find their way into the strategies of low-income countries which lack the state capacity to implement them.
One international example of everything-bagel development comes from the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While the MDGs focused on a limited set of key targets, the SDGs broadened the scope significantly. The 17 SDGs come with 169 targets, muddying the waters of accountability and stretching the capacity even of global institutions.
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock write persuasively about the effects of overly ambitious and complex policymaking in low-income countries in their book, Building State Capability. They describe the “isomorphic mimicry” that occurs in these situations, where governments become proficient at saying the right thing, producing shiny strategies which promise to do the kinds of ambitious things championed by donors. Yet they remain incapable of actually implementing these strategies because they lack the necessary capacity.
To combat everything-bagel development and isomorphic mimicry governments must be pragmatic about what they can realistically hope to achieve in the short term and seek to carefully build their capabilities in the medium to long term. Crucially – Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock point out – this requires building slowly and learning along the way; what they call Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA).
All this is not to say that government policies and donor-led development programmes should not come with conditions attached and accountability mechanisms in place. They very much should. When it comes to spending taxpayers’ money – whether it comes from domestic or donor country taxpayers – accountability is paramount. But there is a big difference between the damaging mission creep of having too many goals and putting in place sufficient conditions and accountability mechanisms to mitigate risk. In fact, conditionality can be used to combat everything-bagel development. For example, donor agencies – and indeed domestic ministries of finance – could make funding disbursements sequential, dependent on steady progress towards more ambitious goals.
What this means for policymakers in developing countries is that when designing new strategies or drafting new public initiatives they should think carefully about the abilities of their government. They should be careful not to let the project’s scope and objectives expand beyond implementation capability. Policies should be tightly tailored to local context and avoid the temptation to rush blindly to international best practise.
While this may sound patronising, Klein’s article reminds us that even rich governments with sophisticated capabilities struggle with implementation when project ambitions get out of hand. For low-income governments, a policy which successfully achieves one or two modest goals – and in so doing fosters a government machine that is adept at getting things done – is infinitely preferable to shooting for the stars but failing to get off the ground.