Putting ‘projectized’ development in perspective

Honadle, George; Rosengard, Jay K.

doi:10.1002/pad.4230030403

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…Blueprint project management is strongly oriented towards structure and control to enable managers to make minor adjustments during implementation in order to maintain projects on target. Gaps between what is planned and what is actually produced are seen as requiring correction (see Honadle and Rosengard, 1983;Rondinelli, 1983;Stout, 1980). Failing to produce outputs as planned frequently begins a vicious cycle of tighter controls, followed by more pressure for results, and greater degrees of failure (Leonard, 1987).…”

Section: The Blueprint Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating blueprint and process: A structured flexibility approach to development management

Brinkerhoff

Ingle

1989

Public Admin & Development

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Managing socio‐economic development according to highly detailed pre‐implementation plans rigidly applied has not had a high degree of success in generating sustained progress in the world's poorer nations. At the other end of the spectrum is the process approach that avoids specifying targets in advance, and concentrates upon building problem‐solving capacity among the people involved. Many international donor and developing country agencies favour the blueprint model, despite its performance weaknesses, for its control and specificity. The process approach is limited by its lack of fit with agency procedures and incentives. This article discusses a structured flexibility approach to development management that integrates the blueprint model's planned structuring of action with the process model's flexibility and iterative learning orientation. This blend provides the basis for the programmatic and financial accountability required to obtain support from donor and developing country bureaucracies, and facilitates adaptive management to deal with uncertain and changing task environments. Case examples from the Caribbean, Portugal, and Pakistan illustrate the application of the structured flexibility approach.

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Section: The Blueprint Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating blueprint and process: A structured flexibility approach to development management

Brinkerhoff

Ingle

1989

Public Admin & Development

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“…When a donor initiates a project in policy analysis (or, more rarely, responds to a government request for one), it may serve the interests of both the donor and the host government for the project to be isolated organizationally (Honadle and Rosengard, 1983). To the host government, a donor project is a foreign element in the body politic.…”

Section: Organizational Quarantinementioning

confidence: 99%

Building institutional capacity for policy analysis: An alternative approach to sustainability

Bremer

1984

Public Admin & Development

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The project approach to development assistance has been criticized for failing to build lasting capacity. The problem lies not in the project approach itself, but in a failure to understand the constraints to capacity development and a consequent misdirection of effort. Policy analysis capacity is developed as an example. Policy analysis requires skills and abilities that public sector institutions in developing countries cannot sustain, owing to a combination of structural and organizational factors, among which personnel constraints are key. These factors inhibit the effectiveness of the standard approach, which seeks to establish analytic capacity within a specialized government unit (‘internal’ capacity). An alternative approach is to build ‘process’ capacity—the ability to get analysis done by other institutions, rather than the ability to do analysis internally. The author concludes that project strategies should be redirected toward a greater emphasis on building process capacity as a useful adjunct to internal capacity.

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“…Nevertheless, having elsewhere urged the virtues of the market, in two chapters the World Development Report changes tack and proceeds in a measure to contradict the straightforward message in the remainder of the Report. First in a thoughtful and informed chapter on project administration (and one that gives the articles on project administration in this number of the Journal an added significance (Honadle, 1983;Rondinelli, 1983;Morgan, 1983)) and then in an unremarkable chapter on managing the public service, some of the complexities of reality, the limitations of present knowledge and understanding and the shortcomings of a simple faith in the market are exposed. Distinguishing project administration for managing people orientated development from projects for physical development, the Report explains that goals may have to be imprecise and unquantifiable in terms of profit and loss; next it emphasizes that there is substantial ignorance about how to design suitable programmes; and then it stresses, in contradiction to the premise elsewhere in the Report, that often the challenge is to create demand rather than satisfy it.…”

Section: The Market As An Administrative Instrumentmentioning

confidence: 99%