The “Decade of Building State Capability” podcast series features interviews with practitioners who reflect on their experience using the PDIA approach and their engagement with Building State Capability over the past 10 years. On today's episode, BSC Director Salimah Samji interviews Michael Woolcock, a co-author of the Building State Capability book. Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Development Specialist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group in Washington, D.C. His current work focuses on interactions between customary and state legal systems, conducted as part of the World Bank’s global ‘Justice for the Poor’ program (which he co-founded), and strategies for assessing complex social interventions. His most recent books are Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia (with Patrick Barron and Rachael Diprose; Yale University Press, 2011), and History, Historians and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue (edited with C.A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao and Simon Szreter; Manchester University Press, 2011). An Australian national, he has an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University. He taught previously at Harvard Kennedy School from 2000-2006, and from 2006-2009 was founding Research Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, where he was Professor of Social Science and Development Policy.
To learn more about Building State Capability (BSC), visit the website, access the PDIA toolkit, read BSC blog posts, and listen to the podcasts.
Salimah Samji Welcome to the Reflecting on a Decade of Building State Capability Podcast series. On today's podcast, I have with me Michael Woolcock. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Woolcock Welcome, Salimah. And welcome everyone here listening. It's great to be here.
Salimah Samji Great. So, Michael, you know, you've been there right from the beginning, even before the beginning. And I think what we want to capture in this podcast today is how you have been using PDIA at your work. For those of you who don't know, Michael works at the World Bank and he is the Lead Social Scientist in the Development Research Group, and he's been there for 25 years. So, Michael, if you could just start a little bit with, you know, the process of coming up with the PDIA approach and then we can move into how you've actually used this at a place like the World Bank.
Michael Woolcock Sure, I can do that. So as you said, I've been 25 years at the World Bank, but all of that in the in the research group and the development research group, people are surprise, surprise, paid to do research. And it was the type of research that I've done over many years, the first half of my career, I guess, that really led to me thinking that we, the whole development profession, just needed to have a much more serious focus on implementation. It seemed to me in every seminar I went to or any sort of big level discussion, it was always policy, policy, policy, more of this, less of that. My policy is better than your policy. And I just thought that isn't it almost self-evident that whatever you've articulated as policy or have claimed that it works in some particular place and that's really different to whether the team that's actually designated to do anything that you've articulated can actually do that and not just do it once, but do it consistently, at scale, under a lot of pressure, and do it in most cases for everyone, not just for a very specific group of people. And so that's an entirely different phenomena. And it just seemed to me that that particular aspect had just been vastly underappreciated. And so the principle of that had been amenable to me for a long time. But actually trying to do something about it required, I guess, a few more strands of gray hair and experience to have the credibility or just the stature to be able to actually articulate stuff like this. So over time, we came to this whole approach of trying to merge both the social science of this, but with the practice of it. And that's ultimately what the book looked like. It's a book in two halves. The first half is all trying to lay out the analytics and the effects of why the orthodox approaches to implementation so often falling short, but also not just shrugging shoulders and sort of saying, oh, we need to get better institutions or a better policy, and that that will fix that. You say, no, there's a whole team of people that has to wake up every day and do this. So we got to figure out from them and working with those people on the front lines of implementation about what their world looks like and why they so often struggle to do it even with the best of intentions. So within the World Bank, as I said, I'm paid to do research, so I am not an implementer on a day to day basis. And even the way that PDIA itself is articulated, if you just look at the handbook or the workbook that goes with all of this, it's to actually do that kind of work with a team of people in a particular country, that then itself is a full time job, for teams of people it is a full time job who really do it seriously. And obviously that was not something I was paid to do or frankly would have been very good at, I don't think. But I wanted to create space for that kind of work and create opportunities for different incarnations, shall we say, of the PDIA spirit and the letter. And so I came to think of it as really having then three different manifestations, three different ways in which the PDIA work was engaging with the world. One was through the approach that we've championed from the beginning of saying, look, this is a really intensive process of working with a specific team in a specific country, working on a specific set of issues that we then want to shrink down to more manageable proportions and then help them to think more systematically through the authorizing environment that they face and then the change space in that they face. And so all of that sort of work was just very intensive. There are others who were available to do that, but that wasn't going to be what I was going to do. The way in which I encountered it was in two different other spaces, not this we'll call it the boutique sort of way, because that's ultimately what it was. It was all end with a very committed group of people, not just for a weekend. It was for months and months at a time to really solve it. And all the case studies that Matt and others are written up about this are all just wonderful insider looks at how that whole experience plays out for teams of people. I came to it through various different avenues. One was through attempts by governments to really rethink their work program around implementation. And the most voluminous, the most ambitious of those particular programs came from Cambodia. And there it was sort of a quintessential example of one of our friend Lant Pritchett's many maxims about life and development. This particular one was: We can't want it more than they do. And I think that's often the case in development. We, outsiders, we people that claim to be development professionals do often deeply care about these particular issues but there's only so much caring and effort one can expand. The ultimate ownership of these processes has to be those governments in those countries that are really trying to embark on a serious change process. And Cambodia, for reasons I won't go into, but just it's, I think, pretty clear that the Seventies were one of the most tragic decades in human history for Cambodia. The people that survived that were just traumatized through life, that their children somehow, I think, have now reached their peak of their professional powers and are very committed to really trying to fundamentally alter what it means to be a public servant in Cambodia. The literal translation of the word public servant in Khmer, the language of the Khmer people is royal officer. So if you work as a public servant, we'll have that notional title in English, in Cambodia, it means you perceive yourself to be an employee of the king and you are an officer. You're essentially in his army, as it were, and you're a good soldier in that army if you do what you're told, you fully comply with all the rules and you don't really deviate. Your job is not to come up with creative ways of solving problems. You just do what the playbook says you should do. And this new generation of leaders is very conscious that the 21st century is delivering a whole array of problems for which there isn't and can't be a predetermined solution. There has to be a whole different framework, a mindset for thinking about how these questions get framed, how they get addressed, how they get analyzed, and then ultimately, of course, how they get responded to. So this particular group had approached the World Bank with a very ambitious plan, saying we are very committed to trying to modernize our whole civil service. We want this to be a whole of government approach. As in, yes, we want tens of thousands of people to be engaging with their work in a fundamentally different way. We happened to have my colleague working in the World Bank office who is very familiar with the PDIA work and didn't have to work too hard to convince the government that they could go with the standard sort of approach to rethinking this whole implementation thing, or they could go really bold and big and try and fundamentally engage with this challenge in a very different way. And it looked like this thing called PDIA. And then we went to try to figure out how to merge that particular emphasis with a new approach to leadership. For this to start even let alone before we could get to that scale, a whole top tier of the senior career civil servants in Cambodia had to buy into this whole approach. And so just giving them an article to read on PDIA, I was never going to fully convinced them that, oh wow, okay, yes, we are now going to suddenly shift our entire modality of functioning and go with what these crazy people at Harvard have come up with. No, they, like anybody else, needed to be persuaded that this was a good use of their time and money and political capital. This is a narrow window. They're very conscious that they've got this moment where the political forces have aligned to make it possible for this whole agenda to move forward. So in their view, the best way to move this forward was to connect it to a leadership program, because as it turned out, many of the people who are running senior positions in the government of Cambodia had never even sort of done an executive ed program at a local business school about what it meant to manage people as well as just the technical aspects of building out spreadsheets and timesheets and all those administrative things that every official has to do. The idea that leadership could be learned, that leadership could be acquired and improved upon, that seemed like a nice synergy with much of what we are trying to do with the PDIA work. So in the pre-COVID period, we set about designing this whole program to an in-person program designed to work with the 800 or so senior most career civil servants across the government of Cambodia. Then of course COVID hit and we had to suddenly engage with our own little micro PDIA process, completely changing this whole format because we were all looking forward to making two or three times a year trips to Cambodia to work very intensively with these people and then bam, all of a sudden every single aspect of it had to be turned into an online program. So every lecture we were going to give, every seminar or workshop that we were going to run, every single aspect of it had to be turned into an online format. And I was, needless to say, dreading this. I just thought, this is going to be awful. It'll be turned from what was a much more organic, in-person, you know, real time teaching kind of thing into a very structured uniform kind of point-by-point, mostly pretty boring therefore approach to it. But that's just how we had to do it. But we did our best to try and weave the content that I was going to provide with all the full array of publicly available PDIA videos that we prepared earlier as it happened, and then thought just more strategically about how can we run this whole thing online for potentially for several years in order to be able to get it to a point where that entire team of people could engage with this. So fast forward at all. We are 94% of people complete this, which is amazing. Mid-nineties levels of satisfaction with it which I could not believe, but this is a revelation to them. No one had ever, ever suggested to a civil servant in Cambodia that you are a problem solver. You are a creative person whose job it is to help make the system that you work in better and trying to not just encourage people in a motivational sense, but giving them a framework, a language, a set of tools for being able to take all these seemingly intractable problems and make them more manageable. The fact that that was actually possible was not only just really thrilling to teach it, but to see that this was exactly what they were looking for, what they wanted to have happen. We're now, literally as we speak, we're in the final stage. And what that final stage entails, I think I can say, of course, is that we have to ultimately hand this back over to the agency in Cambodia that would otherwise be doing this kind of training, it's the Royal School of Administration. The whole purpose of this is to make it look, smell, touch, taste and feel Cambodian and that this has to be something that they can do now with the next tier down of the civil service. We've convinced, in effect, the top tier of government that this is doable. This is something that they can own and operate themselves. But now they themselves have to actually do that kind of work. And that's still an open question. I've been, I like to think, sort of guardedly optimistic along the whole process of all of this, but everything has gone pretty well so far. So we'll just see how that works out. You know, there's a lot of steps still to be taken, a lot of learning to happen. But I'm just really thrilled that the government themselves have wanted it more than we did. And I think that's the key part of all of this, is we've done our part. We've shown up. We've been diligent in our preparation and thorough in answering all the questions of which there are many. Now it's their turn and they have embraced all of that. But now, across their own national elections, the incoming government is still willing and able to support this. So that's a huge, big win as well especially in the authorizing space. Anyway, so that's sort of one particular way in which I can be engaged in countries where you're really trying to sort of do public teaching like large scale engagements with people around why orthodox approaches to these kinds of challenges so often fall short, and then what a better supportable, implementable alternative to it looks like. It looks a bit like PDIA, we think. Then outlining what those different component parts are. The other ways in which we've, at least I've engaged with it at the World Bank has been in contributing as part of a team to an ongoing reform process and invitations and come up with the funder or the donor in this certain situation has asked that we take a more adaptive approach to implementation. And some of the people who know this stuff will sort of, the only adaptive thing we know in-house that's got some legs so far is this thing called PDIA that these people have come up with. So I get invited to be part of all of that. And that's a really different kind of engagement because I know in those particular moments I'm not giving a detailed blow by blow sort of introduction to PDIA. This is what it means to be part of all of this. It's really just trying to help people implicitly, if not explicitly, engage with a reform process, but in a way that's consistent with the principles of PDIA. But in those situations, when I'm part of a team, oftentimes very well seasoned experts, in particular sectoral fields like education, the last thing I want to do is sort of clear the path people. The team with the answer has arrived. Listen to us, follow, and then beautiful things will happen. Like that would be the antithesis of everything we've ever said about how reform should be done. So my job in that sort of situation is to really engage in a shared learning process and demonstrate what a shared learning process looks like and trying to show that I'm there to learn from you. We all hope that that's a mutual process. And over time, in the last 18 months in Papua New Guinea, a really, really different country where the maximum still holds that we can't want it more than they do. But there is nonetheless different pockets of influence that really want to try and change things. And that's where we've really tried to go with things. And they're not just at the senior authorizing level. There's lots of discretionary space. For better and for worse in the PNG public sector generally, but in education in particular, there again you find extraordinary people, the people we dedicated building state capability to. The ones that show up every day doing their job, often under very difficult circumstances with very little recognition, where their pay arrives intermittently at best, but who believe very powerfully that that's their job, that's what they can do to try and make their country a better place. And finding those people, talking with those people, naming those people for the work that they're doing and saying it's these kind of people doing this kind of work, even if they're not doing it under some formal notion of now I'm doing PDIA, saying this is the kind of work that we need everybody to be doing and not just, you know, working your butt off. It's thinking creatively about how you deal with problems. And they face really serious problems. Just visit some of these schools entails four days of travel, two of them up a river, and then the other two days across mountains where a track doesn't even exist, fighting off all sorts of creatures of one kind or another, all just to see a single teacher school. That's not easy work. That's hard. There's no glamor in doing that kind of work. It's dangerous to do that kind of work. So PNG is sort of the antithesis of how you need to have as decentralized approach as possible but it needs to be managed decentralization, it's not just anything goes at the local level. To build out a system of education that produces people and students that are really actively learning and themselves being able to do the things they need to be able to do at the age they need to be doing it. That's just going to take a whole different modality of engagement. And so the PDIA work has been there have been a implicit rather an explicit contribution to this thinking through at every stage what the reform process is going to look like with inspectors, what's it going to look like with regards to data management, what it's going to look like with regards to the classroom settings and the public financial management of schools. All that stuff is still very much a work in progress, but that's how we can be useful in those situations. The idea of the spirit of PDIA is infusing all of that and is there by invitation of both the donors and the government who does actually want to think about these things. The other final way, the third sort of way in which this happened is just through more data analysis of just being able to help people understand just what their world looks like. And I think a lot of the interesting stuff that's come out of Africa, that it hasn't just been the deep dive work into PFM work, but the other stuff that's just been looking at the different ways in which different groups have taken the opportunity to be able to think about implementation work in a different way and do it, but not just in a randomly different way, a systematically different way, and have been able to craft different and better ways forward for those challenges that they face. When that kind of work starts to get written up, that kind of work starts to be truly organic. It's happening explicitly because they want it more than we do. They want it so much they're willing to take it on and implement themselves because they have had a gutful of seeing the standard modalities of training and technology and all the rest, just being dumped on people, or the universal best practices being told to them as the optimal way forward. There is just a lot of creativity going on and a lot of that then won't be measurable in any sort of clear way that convinces people with folded arms in a seminar room at Harvard. When you live it, when you see it, and you start to see a new vocabulary, a new modality of engagement and a new seriousness and conviction with regards to implementation issues starting to take hold. If that's what the Building State Capability team has been able to do, as you know, the inner sanctum, the sort of four or five people that have been part of this from the beginning, then that has to be a huge win. If everybody could do that, I think that would be really amazing. Now, there's criticism along the way with all of that, that's normal, that's okay. But I think we are just trying to practice what we preach. We just trying to do what we said was necessary, which is to engage with people on their own terms to build out the legitimacy of the change process, to make it ultimately be owned and operated locally, and to say that you can get there, but we can maybe facilitate that process if you are able to think about certain key aspects in a more systematic way. And that's been effectively what we said we thought should happen. And I think in our own imperfect but nonetheless honest and diligent way, that's kind of no matter where PDIA gets taken seriously, that's what it looks like. Some version of those three things, the boutique all-in, let's work on it for a month at a time to solve this series of big challenges. The even bigger picture problem of how we engage with big system wide change or working more idiosyncratically with individual teams who are finding the space to do things differently and haven't got the time or the reasonable thing to build in a full team of people around them that are just doing what they can to fulfill their own mission of being a good civil servant. And when we see that happening, how can you not like doing this stuff.
Salimah Samji That's really incredible, Michael. You know, one thing that we do hear a lot from the people that we train, whether it's students here at the Kennedy School or people come to take or executive education or practitioners we engage directly with in countries all over the world is how do you do this type of work, whether it's PDIA, adaptive, flexible, whatever word you want to use, work within large organizations like the World Bank or the IDB. And given that you work in one of those and in the research group nonetheless that doesn't even do implementation and have actually been able to do this at such scale, what would your advice be to listeners who are working in these large organizations and are really struggling to be able to work in different ways?
Michael Woolcock I guess my answer would be an extension of the Pritchettian mantra that I just said before, like, we can't want it more than they do. You've got to find a counterpart who has lived orthodoxy and is frustrated with it and has the courage and the temperament to be able to think about this really differently. I think of work that I've been able to do in India with some of our graduates actually from the MPID program in Meghalaya, that's all work in maternal health care. And then all that work is overseen by an IAS officer that was a senior official in public service, who was a graduate of the executive ed program. And he had sort of an epiphany when he took that course here. And he sort of made an oath to himself almost, that he would be championing this in his work back in India. And he's lived up to that. He's done exactly that. He's hired two of our graduates who lived in Meghalaya for at least two and a half years trying to implement all of this kind of work. We had a big workshop there last summer sponsored by the Gates Foundation and some of my World Bank colleagues from the Delhi office came to this as well. So this was the beginnings of something that was led by the Indian government through this IAS officer but then partially funded by the Gates Foundation, but endorsed and supported by people from various different multilateral agencies who were working in India at that particular time. So that particular work had lots of different spin offs happening. But it's one episode. It's what it takes you, what you can do if you have someone who is willing and able from the inside to be a real champion of that. They wanted it more than we did. And once that's true, then a lot of really good things can happen. Once there's a strong demand side, if you want to put it in more formal sort of terms, then at least in other mantras that we claim to live by about, you know, having governments in the driver's seat and being responsive to clients and all that sort of stuff. If governments themselves want this kind of approach to doing it, then we're duty bound by that sort of logic to be able and willing to respond to it constructively. So those are the kind of calls that I get. I got an email early this week from a colleague in Kenya who's found himself with a mandate to spend a lot of money on this kind of approach and of course the government wants it and so his email was sort of a plea, what are we going to do to be able to respond effectively to all of that? So I think there isn't a short answer, but the short answer is, we can't want it more than they do. Once they want it, then we should be as development professionals, able to know our field well enough to be able to say, well, yeah, there is something brewing in this implementation space that is really different from, but in some ways consistent with earlier generations of people that have engaged with this kind of work. But we've now formalized this in a way that enables it to be taught and practiced in different communicative modalities, whether it's in person, online, in smaller groups, etc., and a good development professional who is serious about solving problems as opposed to sending more money around and just being a custodian of any given administrative unit that actually does what they probably thought they wanted to do in their early twenties, which was to be useful in the world and to actually help people solve the problems they're engaging with, they should be able to do what I get steady requests for these days, which is being able to respond to these kind of questions. Maybe we can do more to formalize that a bit more now that there is a true momentum behind this kind of work. But that's a next step. That's a different kind of scale of working for us at this. But we want this to ultimately be an organic process that unfolds and builds in its own way. And if we can do that, then we will be able to hand it on, so to speak, to a next generation that comes after us to be able to take this where they need to go. But so far so good.
Salimah Samji Thank you, Michael. This has been a real delight. I've really enjoyed just hearing all of the, I mean, you know, we generally do work together, but all of these things that you do, we're not always aware of. And it is really great to be able to capture the incredible work and different ways you've made PDIA yours.
Michael Woolcock Thanks. And thanks to listeners too, but also to governments that didn't have to do this. They themselves are the most entrepreneurial people on the donor side recognize that they can just crank out money or they can be useful. And sometimes those are the same thing and often times they're not. And the ones that I enjoy working with most are ones that have gone out of their way to invite me or Matt or Lant or you or anybody else that's been part of this process to really help them get up to speed. And they could ignore that or they could take it, it's a wager, I won't say it's a gamble. It's a wager, you're taking a calculated risk any time you try and do something that's new or something that hasn't been fully tested, so to speak. But that's true of everything. And so we were happy to be wagering that this was consistent with the evidence, this was consistent with historical practice and was how most of big organizations got big and how they got good at doing what they're doing. And another little anecdote. For my sins, I got invited a few years ago to be on one of these panels at a conference, and I was there sort of representing the sort of adaptive development approach. But I was on the panel with a guy from NASA and a guy from the National Transport Safety Board. Right. The guys that sort of investigate why a plane didn't land perfectly at an airport or worse, that actually set it off or even worse, sort of had an accident. And so I think that I was sort of mildly amused to think that development was sort of just trying to learn by doing and fixing up with some mistakes. The whole reason that you can put spacecraft into orbit, the whole reason that planes never crash despite having flown hundreds of thousands of times across the Pacific Ocean between Australia and the United States is because every single aspect has been thought about and they build this whole learning culture into what they're doing. And when you start seeing governments do that and being encouraged to think about that as the way they go about doing things, we're not working in a space that is technology as such, and we're not trying to fix the aircraft or trying to fix people. And that's inherently a very, very different kind of challenge. But the spirit of that, the spirit that humans are learning creatures. We can get better at what we do. We don't just have to accept the way that things are. And when you see donors getting that, when you see seeing central governments, local governments getting that, and you see the rising generation of development practitioners being taught stuff that we were never taught in grad school, you sort of think, oh wow, this is a moment. This is a chance for doing that. And then you read the headlines every day now with all the catastrophes unfolding in the world and you think the big problems are just bigger versions of ancient problems of how do we get along with each other and how do we make this system work for everybody. And it's hard and it gets super contentious and it gets ugly and violent very easily. And anything that tries to anticipate those kind of challenges and head them off and try to find a more constructive path, then we're just getting better at what we're doing. We are recognizing the very fraught process of change that we are trying to bring about that we call development. And if we can build into that way of functioning a very different approach to thinking about why we do what we do and how we do what we do, then you know, that's a real profession. That's not just a group of people who are just slaves to a system. I want that to think as the ultimate legacy of our program is that it really did help people think about and do development differently. That was our mantra ten years ago. That was a slogan. And everything else we like to think has sort of been a manifestation of efforts around the world to try and make that happen.
Salimah Samji Thank you, Michael.
Michael Woolcock All right, thanks to everybody. It's been great. Thank you.
Kathryn Lang Thank you for listening to our podcast today. If you liked it, please check out our website bsc.hks.harvard.edu or you can follow us on social media @HarvardBSC. You can also find links and other information under the description of this podcast.