Interim Institutions and the Development Process: Opening Spaces for Reform In Cambodia and Indonesia

Abstract

While there is broad agreement among scholars and practitioners on the importance of 'good governance', 'the rule of law' and 'effective institutions' for ensuring positive development outcomes, we have a much poorer understanding of how such goals should be realised. Whether informed by modernisation theory, Marxist perspectives or neoclassical assumptions, the prevailing imperatives guiding the work of development actors-from international agencies to national line ministries and local non-government organisations-tend to produce reforms that encourage (and in some cases actively require) rapid, linear, technically driven transitions to predetermined end-state institutional forms deemed to be global 'best practice'. Drawing on two very different cases from Indonesia and Cambodia, we outline an alternative, more process-oriented approach that focuses on building 'interim institutions'-that is, formal or informal institutions conceived of in terms of their potential to engage with and incrementally transform the political economies within which they exist. Successful interim institutional approaches, we suggest, are hybrid in their nature; they are based on local knowledge but promote principles of rule-based, transparent and accountable decision making towards an end-state which emerges through a process of equitable political contestation ('good struggles'), and is thus largely unknowable ex ante. A key goal of development assistance strategies should be to support the emergence of interim institutions which can both facilitate and be transformed by such contests.

Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation

“…13 Our approach throughout this paper is in the spirit of several parallel efforts stressing the importance of local innovation and context specificity is the design of effective organizations for development. See, among others, Rondinelli (1993) on 'projects as policy experiments ', Grindle (2004', Grindle ( , 2010 on 'good enough governance', van de Walle (2007) on 'paths from neo-patrimonialism', Rodrik (2008) on 'second-best institutions', Adler et al (2009) on the importance of 'good struggles' for political and legal reform, and Levy and Fukuyama (2010) on 'just enough governance'.…”

Building State Capability

“…This is because PDIA draws on and synthesizes the ideas of others, and should thus be seen as building on a foundation of past work. Others who have made similar arguments includes those whose work uses expressions such as "learning organizations" (Senge 2006), "projects as policy experiments" (Rondinelli 1993), "adaptive versus technical problems" (Heifetz 1994), "positive deviance" (Marsh et al 2004), institutional "monocropping" versus "deliberation" (Evans 2004), "experimentation" (Mukand and Rodrik 2005;de Búrca et al 2014), "good-enough governance" (Grindle The challenge of building (real) state capability for implementation 2004), "democracy as problem-solving" (de Souza Briggs 2008), "problemdriven political economy" (Fritz et al 2009), "the science of muddling through" (Lindblom 1959(Lindblom , 1979, the "sabotage of harms" (Sparrow 2008), "second-best institutions" (Rodrik 2008), "interim institutions" (Adler et al 2009), "good intentions" versus real results (Easterly 2002), "multi-agent leadership" , "rapid results" (Matta and Morgan 2011), "upside down governance" (Institute for Development Studies 2010), challenges of "governing the commons" (Ostrom 1990(Ostrom , 2008McCay 2002), "justenough governance" (Levy and Fukuyama 2010), "best fit" strategies (Booth 2011), "principled incrementalism" (Knaus 2011), "radical institutional change" (Greenwod and Hinings 1996), and "experiential learning" (Pritchett et al 2012), among others.…”

Surveying Justice: A Practical Guide to Household Surveys

“…As noted above, a theory of change based on transplanting and accelerating "best practice" is often antithetical to this aspiration. The first steps along this path-for example, reforming labor law in Cambodia or local governance norms in Indonesia-may appear decidedly "non-best practice" to certain eyes, but building these "interim institutions" (Adler, Sage, and Woolcock 2009) through a process of equitable contestation (or "good struggles") between contending parties is how many effective institutions arose in today's developed countries, and provides the mechanism through which both the content and the legitimacy of reforms is determined.…”