Policy Research Talk: Building State Capability for Policy Implementation

Life for most people in most developing countries continues to steadily improve, but raising basic levels of human welfare from a low base was the (relatively) easy part of the development journey. To consolidate and expand these achievements, the key challenge going forward is building the state’s capability to implement incrementally more complex and contentious tasks (e.g., health care, justice, regulation, taxation, land administration) at scale. Unfortunately, this capability seems to be stagnating or declining in most low-income countries, despite long-standing efforts. In this talk, Michael Woolcock outlined a different approach to building state capability for policy implementation.