state capability

Assuming financial capability of the state, in the future tht make all schools virtual

Salimah Samji, CID's Building State Capability Program Director, interviews Matt Andrews, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard Kennedy School on their recently launched book "Building State Capability - Evidence, Analysis, Action". Michael Woolcock, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School is also a co-author.
Recorded on the book launch event on February 13th, 2017.

The book uses data to identify failures in efforts to build state capability in development, employs theory to explain why these failures are common and likely to persist-keeping countries in capability traps--and builds on applied experience to offer a new approach to build state capability more effectively. 

‘Building State Capability provides anyone interested in promoting development with practical advice on how to proceed—not by copying imported theoretical models, but through an iterative learning process that takes into account the messy reality of the society in question. The authors draw on their collective years of realworld experience as well as abundant data and get to what is truly the essence of the development problem.’  Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University;

Building State Capability - Evidence, Analysis, Action

CID Student Ambassador Emily Ausubel interviews Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability Program at Harvard University and Matt Andrews, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Faculty Associate at the same  program. Matt and Salimah talk about how the Building State Capability program came about, explain us what is the Program’s core methodology and how it’s being applied by hundreds of practitioners worldwide.
Interview recorded on February 23rd, 2018
// cid.harvard.edu //
// bsc.cid.harvard.edu //

About Salimah Samji: Salimah Samji is the Director of the Building State Capability (BSC) Program. She has over fifteen years of experience working in international development, on issues of public service delivery, transparency and accountability, strategic planning, and monitoring and evaluation. She joined CID in 2012 to help create the BSC program and is responsible for strategic planning and oversight. Salimah also leads the PDIA online courses. 

Prior to joining CID, she was an independent consultant working for the World Bank on issues of governance, and the Hewlett Foundation on strategic planning for one of their grantees. She has worked as a senior program manager at Google.org, leading a transparency and accountability initiative focused on empowering citizens and decision makers, by making information on service delivery outcomes, publicly available. Salimah has also worked at the World Bank as a social/rural development and monitoring and evaluation specialist in South Asia. 

She has a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a Masters in Public Administration in International Development (MPAID) from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a qualified Casualty Actuary who decided to change careers after her 18-month experience working in Afghan refugee camps with a Canadian NGO (FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance) based in Pakistan. Salimah has worked and lived in Kenya, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Canada and the USA. 
 
About Matt Andrews: Matt Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy. His research focuses on public sector reform, particularly budgeting and financial management reform, and participatory governance in developing and transitional governments. Recent articles focus on forging a theoretical understanding of the nontechnical factors influencing success in reform processes. Specific emphasis lies on the informal institutional context of reform, as well as leadership structures within government-wide networks. This research developed out of his work in the provincial government of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa and more recently from his tenure as a Public Sector Specialist working in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. He brings this experience to courses on public management and development. He holds a BCom (Hons) degree from the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa), an MSc from the University of London, and a PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.

Doing Development Differently: The Building State Capability Program and the PDIA Methodology

Public organizations often have trouble implementing the policies and programs that will benefit the state and its constituents and the public sector in India is no exception. The perception of the state’s capacity to implement policy is often called into question so how can civil servants in India overcome the barriers they face to policy implementation?

Today on CID’s Speaker Series podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability Program at CID interviews Yamini Aiyar of the Centre for Policy Research, who provides first-hand details on culture within the public sector in India. Salimah and Yamini further examine India’s state capabilities and discuss remedies that could improve decision-making processes within the government. 

Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of CPR - the Centre for Policy Research - one of India’s leading public policy think tanks. Her research interests are in the field of social policy and development. In 2008, Yamini founded the Accountability Initiative at CPR. Under her leadership, the Accountability Initiative has produced significant research in the areas of governance, state capacity and social policy.

// www.bsc.cid.harvard.edu //
Interview recorded on June 6th, 2018.

About Yamini Aiyar: Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of CPR. Her research interests are in the field of social policy and development. In 2008, Yamini founded the Accountability Initiative at CPR. Under her leadership, the Accountability Initiative has produced significant research in the areas of governance, state capacity and social policy. It pioneered a new approach to tracking public expenditures for social policy programs and is widely recognised for running the country’s largest expenditure-tracking survey in elementary education. Yamini’s own research on social accountability, elementary education, decentralisation and administrative reforms has received both academic and popular recognition. 

Yamini Aiyar is a TED fellow and a founding member of the International Experts Panel of the Open Government Partnership. She has also been a member of the World Economic Forum’s global council on good governance. Previously, she has worked with the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program and Rural Development unit in Delhi, where she focused on action research aimed at strengthening mechanisms for citizen engagement in local government. Additionally, she was a member of the decentralisation team at the World Bank that provided policy support to strengthen Panchayati Raj (local governance) in India.

Aiyar is an Alumnus of the London School of Economics, St. Edmund's college Cambridge University, and St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.

Rules vs. Responsiveness: The Challenges of Building State Capability in India

On this week’s podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program at CID, interviews Mark Moore, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who will be teaching the new Building State Capability online course titled “Creating Public Value”.

// www.bsc.cid.harvard.edu //
Interview recorded on September 13, 2018.

About Mark Moore: Mark H. Moore is the Hauser Professor of Nonprofit Organizations. His current primary focus is studying the processes that enable social innovation and change to occur in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions.

Building State Capability - Creating Public Value Course Promo

Michael Woolcock has been at the World Bank for 20 years, where he is the Lead Social Scientist in the Development Research Group. For twelve years he has also been a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

As a sociologist, he's written about culture, social development, and social capital. Michael is also on the editorial board for Accord's new journal, Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy (CRDA). 

Nathan Mallonee from Living Water International talks with Michael about how he got to the World Bank from Australia, his new book on building state capability, the case for using mixed methods for research, and ideas for papers he'd like to see submitted to the CRDA journal.

Here is a link to Michael's new book, Building State Capability: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/building-state-capability-9780198747482?cc=us&lang=en& 

Here is a link to the call for papers for the CRDA journal: https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/announcement 


Michael's Book Recommendations:

‘Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Opening of the West’, by D’Arcy Jenish. A biography of the life of first person to map the western coast of North America, from (what is now) Oregon through to British Columbia, and vast areas inland to Hudson Bay. His maps became the basis for where exactly the border was drawn between the US and Canada along the 49th parallel, and included being the first to traverse (and map) the full length of the Columbia River. Doing all this entailed surviving decades of unimaginably cold winters, crossing the Rocky Mountains on foot endless times, learning some of the languages of indigenous peoples, and doing all manner of complex negotiations – all without ever losing a man.
 
‘The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold’, by Geoffrey Robertson. Incredible account of the first legal team to challenge the divine right of kings, in the 1640s, arguing that no-one was above the law -- when that notion had never before been tested on a head of state, in this case a king (Charles I) whose civil wars had led one in ten Englishmen to their deaths. The lead lawyer, John Cooke, undertook this task knowing full well that it would likely lead to his own death, which it duly did in the most gruesome manner… Makes a bad day for me seem like a stroll in the park…
 
And the justly classic ‘The Hiding Place’, by Corrie Ten Boom. “Give thanks in all things” takes on a whole new meaning after reading this book…

state capability

Viliame Lewenilovo