Q2. What is the key characteristic of the capability trap facing many developing countries?
The emphasis on form (what organizations ‗look like‘) over function (what they actually ‗do‘) is a crucial characteristic of the capability trap facing many developing countries.
Q3. What is the direct way to redress the bias towards externally prescribed forms?
Focusing on prevailing problems is the most direct way of redressing the bias to externally prescribed forms towards internal needs for functionality; it ensures that problems are locally defined, not externally determined, and puts the onus on performance, not compliance.
Q4. What is the upshot of a'results based financing'?
The upshot is unimplemented laws, unfunded agencies, and unused processes littering education sectors, public financial management regimes and judiciaries across the globe (Pritchett, Woolcock and Andrews 2010).
Q5. What does the focus on problems do?
The focus on problems also incentivizes organizations to emphasize their performance, and encourages contributions from leaders and front-line workers to work for change.
Q6. What is the importance of facilitating positive deviations?
Facilitating such positive deviations, through incremental steps, is especially important in uncertain and complex contexts where reformers are unsure of what the problems and solutions actually are and lack confidence in their abilities to make things better.
Q7. What is the basic message of the article?
The basic message must be that interventions are successful if they empower a constant process through which agents make organizations better performers,regardless of the forms adopted to effect such change.
Q8. Why do many reform initiatives fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance?
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do.
Q9. What is the spectacular large-scale contemporary example?
Perhaps the most spectacular large-scale contemporary example is that the richest and most powerful nation in the history of humankind has just spent a decade—and enormous amounts of blood (almost 2000 dead) and treasure (over half a trillion dollars)—attempting to (re)build state capability in a very small and poor South Asian country.
Q10. What is the importance of capturing lessons?
The necessary experimentation processes require mechanisms that capture lessons and ensure these are used to inform future activities.
Q11. What is the result of the top-down approach to building procurement capacity in these countries?
The result is a top-down approach to building procurement capacity (and beyond) in these governments, through which external role players impose themselves on local contexts and crowd out potential contributions local agents might make to change.
Q12. What is the importance of active learning mechanisms and iterative feedback loops?
The importance of active learning mechanisms and iterative feedback loops A problem-driven, stepwise reform process can thus help countries escape from capability traps.
Q13. What is the importance of distributed agency in the process of change and development?
Their argument draws on literatures about institutional entrepreneurship and the importance of distributed agency in the process of change and development.