Governance Reform: The New Analytics of Next Steps

In most recent writings about governance reform and development, recipes are out. So are “one size ?ts all” and idealized end states. Similarly, in the study and practice of development, disappointment is clear with approaches that extol getting the policies right, and getting the institutions right increasingly raises critical eyebrows. Best practice cannot be far away from the conceptual dustbin, condemned as it often is for mistaken assumptions about institutional isomorphism. Universal standards, important in setting international development agendas, have also proved to be particularly unrealistic and frustrating, especially for countries that have the farthest to go. Moreover, assumptions about the predictability of relationships between policy actions and their consequences have often been shown to be hollow.