There could be four broad reasons for reduced development effectiveness: that the messages of donor assistance - i.e. the knowledge that donors wish to impart - are either substantively wrong, or are too costly to deliver, or are delivered in an ineffective way, or are not to the liking of their recipients. There is no doubt some truth in all of the above four propositions (and perhaps of others we have not thought of). This program dwells most on the first reason - the wrong message, which also covers elements of the poorly delivered message and the unwelcome message.

It may be that we have a half-formed idea of what we mean by governance which compounds our inability to make progress in finding solutions. Our failure to make progress may be because we are so sure we have a solution - a mindset of "first-bestism" may thus be the problem. This mindset has several elements:

• In spite of the new mantra of "good fit", we are still too keen to push "best practice". Perhaps we are now more subtle: we may be less inclined to dictate the structure of a ministry, but we "know" that meritocracy and decentralization are the way to go.
  
  
• This first-bestism is evident in the way that donors behave as institutions and expect the experts they send to behave: experts are always expected to provide the answer (more than to foster a debate where others might provide the answers).
  
  
• First-bestism has some powerful allies, and can cement a mutual conspiracy between donors and governments. First-bestism serves useful career-building or bureaucracy-building purposes within the donors. It also serves local purposes in client countries: it allows the aid to flow freely, it allows the avoidance of politically inconvenient debates about the true nature of the problem, and it sanctions inactivity.
  
  
• First-bestism inhibits our conversations with people outside of government. In our first best world, the only question is how to get governments to see that particular light, and we only need to talk with other interest when they can assist us in pushing for our latest certainty (for instance local, bottom-up government).

So, perhaps we have to think of a new mindset and new messages.

The new mindset might seek to convey a sense of the tradeoffs between approaches, rather than a certainty about which one: instead of trying to convince clients that there is only one way to go, we could be trying to get them to think through the options without any prior certainty about the path that they will choose. Our experts should be there to foster a debate and encourage challenge (and feed in the range of experiences from elsewhere that might enrich this debate).

What might the right messages be? Some of the new (perhaps not so new) thinking can be captured as follows:

• Institutional reform is an experimental, piecemeal process, and cannot be tackled in a comprehensive, over-night fashion. This is consistent with modern views of how organizations learn and adapt and how institutions change historically. Institutional reform is as dependent on local conditions and on the demand for reform, which comes out of local institutional realities and the political process, as it is on the supply of (standard) technical solutions. Foreign experience remains an immensely important (and under-used) source of knowledge, but its relevance must be seen through the filter of local conditions.
  
  
• Since institutional change is thus incremental and context-specific, assistance in the process must be about building the capacity to analyze and solve problems, rather than providing the blueprints for this.
  

Further reading:

• North, Douglass. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  
  
• Spink, Peter. 1999. In Reforming the State Managerial Public Administration in Latin America, Bresser Pereira, Carlos, and Peter Spink, eds Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

This page has been developed from a note by Geoffrey Shepherd, an advisor to this program.