the knowledge systems implications of institutions for high quality growth

8/19/2019 The Knowledge Systems Implications of Institutions for High Quality Growth

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The knowledge systems implications of

building institution for high-quality growth(*)

Andrés Rius

IDRC

Avda. Brasil 2655

11300 Montevideo

Uruguay

[email protected]

March, 2003

First crude draft; comments welcome

(*) This paper was possible thanks to an IDRC internal Writing Award and the generous support of the

Center for International Development, Harvard University, which provided a hospitable and stimulating

environment for research and reflection. The views expressed in the paper are those of the author and do

not necessarily reflect those of IDRC.


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Introduction

The notion that developing countries need to generate their own, knowledge-based

solutions to their development challenges has become conventional wisdom in the international

development community and in research circles in the developing world. Those solutions, is

increasingly assumed, involve a process of institutional reform and even institution building, or

the putting in place of certain “social technologies” to promote high-quality growth. 1 The

recognition of the value of research-based knowledge in those efforts has led to various

initiatives aimed at establishing and/or strengthening local knowledge systems for development,

and particularly political, economic and social knowledge systems (PESKS).2 There may be

less agreement on where to start or how to proceed, but most key players agree that creating a

minimum critical mass of capacity to produce policy-relevant research is an important step in

promoting socio-economic progress. This convergence of views may have been provoked by

simultaneous changes in the international economic environment, developing countries’ political

environments and predominant policy stances, and international organizations’ conceptions

about development (Ndulu, 1997).

The emerging consensus usually assumes that the technically stronger the research

output from local PESKS, and the better it is communicated to policy makers, the greater the

1 Rodrik (2000) implicitly defines “high-quality growth” as involving more predictable long-run growth

rates, greater short-term stability, greater ability to cope with adverse shocks, and better distributional

outcomes than, say, low-quality growth (see Rodrik, 2000). The arguments below would be essentially

unaffected by the replacement of such expression with “sustainable human development”, or simply

“development”. While these latter expressions are rightly more encompassing and come closer to an

ethically defensible goal for national and international policies, they frequently resonate as too vague(“development”) or associated with specific international organizations and their approaches (“human

development”, with the work of the UNDP). An added advantage of “high-quality growth” is that it

implicitly points to fields, such as a macroeconomic stabilization policy, that are frequently construed to be

more “technical” and therefore excluded from the kind of analysis that is advocated below.2 Political, economic and social knowledge systems, or PESKS for short, are here defined to comprise the

constellation of sites where political, economic and social analysis is produced and used. Main actors in

PESKS are social science researchers (broadly defined to include a variety of development experts, policy

analysts, etc., as well as social scientists more narrowly defined), and the institutions and communities that

are actively engaged in the funding, commissioning, and use of social research for policy-making.


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chances of it being reflected in policies and the higher the quality (effectiveness, efficiency) of the

resulting policies. This is taken to require the upgrading of the technical skills of research

communities in developing countries, and their organization more or less after the model of

social sciences research systems in the developed world. A pervasive communications gap isalso frequently noted to separate researchers from policy makers and, as a response, the

initiatives to strengthen developing countries’ PESKS also involve specific activities and

mechanisms aimed at “bridging” the gap and ensuring that research results reach those with

access to the power that may translate them into policies. Efficiency considerations, and

awareness of the opportunities created by rapidly evolving information and communication

technologies, frequently lead to complementary investments in building international networks

that would allow local researchers to harness the knowledge available in the global

“marketplace of ideas”.

While some influential players have embraced these strategies and principles more

recently (Wolfensohn, 1996; Johnson and Stone, 2000), some developed countries’ agencies

and foundations have been investing in building research capacities for development in the global

South for many years (Rathgeber, 2001) (DUTCH, DFID). The results of those investments

could be said to have been at least mixed, if assessed on the basis of the capacities available

today in many countries or regions that have received very significant investments (Harrison and

Neufeld, 2002) ( WDR1998; Dottridge, PPG; Fukuda-Parr), and definitely meager if the

criterion to assess them were the quality of policies regularly adopted in those countries –not to

mention the development outcomes that they were ultimately meant to bring about. Valuable as

the wider-ranging new consensus certainly is, this paper argues that its full potential may fail to

be realized unless the actors involved come to grips with lessons that have been learned in three

apparently unconnected but directly relevant streams of scholarship. Those lessons are well-

established in some of the respective fields, or beginning to sink in others. When taken together,

they make evident the need to re-think research capacity building quite radically.3 In fields like

3 Fukuda-Parr, Lopes and Malik (2002) similarly argue for a radical re-thinking of “capacity building”, by

which they mean primarily technical assistance. Our focus of analysis is not technical assistance per se but

the creation and consolidation of local PESKS in developing countries, and our attention to selected

segments of the sciences studies and policy studies literatures lead us to some similar but also some new


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global environmental policy, where the “research” expected to “influence policy” has a larger

component of the “hard”, natural sciences, those lessons seem to have been already taken up

and are being acted upon. However, the efforts aimed at strengthening PESKS in developing

countries still seem too much influenced by outmoded paradigms of knowledge systemsorganization.

The first of those stream of scholarship that must be confronted is on institutions that

promote high-quality growth. Those institutions have been assimilated to social technologies

for development, but recent empirical and analytical work has challenged the notion that those

technologies are standard, general purpose, codified, and readily available in the global

marketplace of ideas, as well as the assumption that the required institutional reforms can

proceed in a piecemeal fashion, independently of pre-existing arrangements, or innocent of pace

or sequence. Instead, an emerging research program has proposed the view that there are

certain economic principles that must be respected by a system of institutions, if it is to produce

sustained high-quality growth, but that there is not unique mapping of those principles into

specific institutional configurations. Moreover, the same literature has highlighted the key role of

democratic political institutions in discovering, and continuously upgrading, the institutional

configurations that best suit each society’s circumstances.

A second significant body of empirical and analytical research has shown that

democratic political systems cannot be assumed to operate as optimizing entities, and that their

behavior is better understood as adaptive or boundedly rational. The performance of adaptive

political systems may be enhanced –in relatively precise terms—by greater doses of technically

rigorous knowledge, but no amount of knowledge will ever allow them to become optimizing

mechanisms. This may be more of a bless than a curse, as will be argued later, and it is certainly

better than possible alternative of enlightened autocracy. More importantly, the specific types of

knowledge that best help democratic systems improve their performance are not necessarily

those that suit an optimizing decision-maker.

conclusions. Stiglitz (2000) is very close in spirit but much less detailed in many of the specific areas in

which this paper ventures.


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Third, the emerging thinking on building PESKS in developing countries has been too

slow to take up the lessons from recent social studies of science and technology. Within these

disciplines there is a growing consensus that knowledge generation and its utilization increasingly

interact in more complicated ways, in a number of interconnected settings, in the most successfulinnovation systems. The picture of the research world drawn by this literature is forcing

redefinitions of the notions of basic and applied research, of the relations among academic

disciplines, of the organization of knowledge industries, and of the quality standards that are

appropriate for the new environment. The implications are as relevant for social scientific

knowledge as they are for the natural sciences and their associated “hard” technologies, and

they affect the ways in which research agendas should be determined, research results should be

validated, and innovation can be expected to occur. The implications for building pro-

development PESKS are still less precisely specified, to some extent because the knowledge

generated in those systems is meant to inform intricate political processes of institutional change.

The purpose of this paper is to bring those three strands of analysis together, to shed

light on the efforts directed at establishing PESKS that support the acquisition of institutions for

high-quality growth. Its primary audience are, therefore, researchers, research managers and

policy makers in developing countries, as well as the constellation of international and bilateral

institutions mandated to support capacity building around research for development. It is shown

that, under the new light, efforts aimed at building pro-development PESKS will require of those

key actors to adjust their strategies with respect to the strategies entailed by the current

conventional wisdom. At a relatively high level of abstraction, the innovative recommendations

emerging from the proposed conceptual framework can be summarized in two key points.

First, domestic and international efforts to build local PESKS in developing countries

should be guided by the utmost priority of contributing to the consolidation of democracies (i.e.,

regimes that at least have a minimal set of attributes to ensure participatory decision-making,

such as free and competitive elections, freedom of political expression and organization, a broad

franchise, and effective exercise of power by elected officials).4 In the context of this article, this

4 See, e.g., Mainwaring, Brinks, and Pérez-Liñán (2001).


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plea is not a moral one but an effectiveness argument derived from the analysis of the role of

institutions in fostering high-quality growth, and of the processes by which societies learn and

innovate to improve socio-economic performance.5 Among various concrete implications, the

effectiveness argument entails, for example, that donors should be less concerned withmaximizing the policy influence of the research they fund than with making sure it fosters

evidence-based, inclusive policy dialogue. Promoting the rule of law, transparency and the

consolidation of accountability mechanisms, should similarly feature more prominently among

donors’ priorities than supporting research to guide countries in the adoption of a “correct” set

of social or economic policies.6

Second, the alternative approach derived from the ensuing analysis shares with the

conventional wisdom the hopes in the Enlightenment ideal of science assisting in the management

of social affairs, but demonstrates that effectiveness in furthering the role of science requires

giving more voice in the knowledge generation process to the lay participants of the policy-

making process. In this case, this is not a plea for the lay public to take control of science and

start to determine its methods, but a recognition that policy-effective science is no longer only

reliable knowledge but must be socially robust knowledge (Gibbons, 1999). When taken to

heart, such recognition has non-trivial implications. For example, the center of gravity of efforts

to strengthen pro-development PESKS may shift from research networks –local or

international—to multi-stakeholder, problem-oriented networks. This may require to give

“research users” more leverage by, for example, expecting them to be actively engaged in

problem formulation. International organizations may find these processes harder to manage,

and certainly they will be much more “political”, but it will seem as the only sensible way to go

5 This is not to question the merit of moral arguments for democracy. To the contrary, the author believes

that such arguments are legitimate and powerful, but realizes that they may not be persuasive enough with

those who worry greatly about the dire life conditions experienced by millions of people who dwell incountries that meet the criteria to be considered democratic. Thus the importance of effectiveness

arguments such as those espoused here. For a similar albeit more philosophical argument, on the fortunate

intersection of ethics and effectiveness, see Unger (1998).6 As will be argued, these apply more directly to bilateral or multilateral (concessional) operations aimed at

strengthening analytical and technical capacities in developing countries, than to the international financial

institutions’ regular lending activity. Nothing in the arguments presented below suggests that lenders

should ignore the social or economic policies being implemented by countries that apply for loans (although


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after acknowledging the recent lessons about the institutions required and about how institutional

innovations occur.

The rest of the paper is organized in three main sections. First, some implicit and explicit

assumptions of the new conventional wisdom on research for development and capacity buildingare briefly spelled out and illustrated with examples from recent international initiatives. Second,

the main contributions from the three key literatures are summarized. Finally, the way they jointly

determine a new view of research capacity building and its normative implications are identified.

Conventional wisdom and practi ce: key features from selected examples

As usual with “conventional wisdoms”, much of their contents is tacit and their holders

form a significant but imprecisely delimited group. This usually puts any attempt at summarizing

their tenets at risk of constructing straw men that do not seem to represent anybody’s thought.

This section is intended to mitigate that risk by forming, from some concrete examples of

ongoing initiatives, a more detailed characterization of existing conventional wisdom on PESKS

in development. The reference to concrete initiatives and institutions is meant to give a sense of

the significance of certain approaches in the development scene, but it is not intended as a

criticism of efforts and organizations that are generally multifaceted and evolving, and that

typically accommodate a range of views on their own objectives and chosen strategies. In any

case, the primary use of this characterization of conventional wisdom is to become a reference

point for a series of propositions that should be internally consistent and merit consideration in

their own right.

Several elements of the conventional wisdom can be illustrated by examining the

objectives, modes of operation, and some of the typical activities of the Global Development

the political legitimacy of the applicant government should probably weight more heavily, as well, in the

broader set of IFIs’ considerations).


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Network (GDN).7 GDN originated in the late 1990s, amidst the efforts of the World Bank to

become a “knowledge bank” and promote greater “ownership” in the setting of development

policies and strategies (Johnson and Stone, 2000). The network’s objectives, as well as its

membership, governance and “products”, have been evolving since the inaugural conference inBonn, in 1999. In those days, the network’s goal was formulated as “to build the capacity in

developing countries to undertake socio-economic research that informs and influences policy”

(Squire, 2000); or, as another participant put it, “to change the perceived role and potential

contribution of think tanks and research centers in the formulation, monitoring and lobbying for

policies” (Seck, 2000, p. xii). Today, those goals are stated as “to support and link research

and policy institutes involved in the field of development, and whose work is predicated on the

notion that ideas matter” and “support the generation and sharing of knowledge for

development and to help bridge the gap between the development of ideas and their practical

implementation. Achieving these goals involves strengthening the capacity of research and policy

institutions to undertake high-quality, policy-relevant research and to move research results into

the policy debates, at both national and global levels.”

(http://www.gdnet.org/subpages/about_objectives.html).

GDN’s objectives reveal a great deal of confidence in the power of knowledge,

knowledge institutions, and researchers, to induce positive policy change, and the conviction

that researchers and think tanks could and should do more to promote the implementation of

policies that follow logically from their analyses. The organization of the first GDN conferences

(Johnson and Stone, 2000, p. 15), and the focus and justification of some of GDN’s early

research initiatives (see, e.g., global project “Bridging research and policy”, and “RAPNet:

Research and Policy Network”), also evidence a perception that the failure of good ideas and

good research to be reflected in better policies is primarily a communication problem, leading to

deliberate efforts to “bridge” research and policy to maximizing “policy influence” (Stone,

7 As mentioned, GDN is a complex and rapidly evolving organization, which may mean that some

observations about its early steps do not accurately reflect some of the latest thinking or practice. Still, most

of the highlighted elements seem to be of an enduring nature and illustrate more widespread habits of

reasoning.


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2000, pp. 245-46).8 The “accountability” role of “independent” think tanks has also been

highlighted regularly in GDN work, occasionally with a caveat on the importance of keeping

good relations with centers of state power that would make it possible for these institutions to

influence policies (Stone, 2000, p. 243). Other participant-observers in the gestation of GDNhave called attention to the constructive role that think tanks could play in processes of “policy

transfer” (Ladi, 2000).9

Among several early criticisms of the GDN from various quarters, two stand out as

most widespread and, at the same time, most deeply felt and decisively acted upon by network

managers and founding participants: the objection to its origins within, and dependence with

respect the World Bank bureaucracy, and the complaint about the predominance of economics

to the neglect of other approaches to development analysis. On the first criticism, we would only

like to retain here for later reference that GDN, as many other international networks, was

proactively promoted by a resourceful international organization. This undoubtedly has risks, but

it may more generally appear as a plausible role for concerned donors or international agencies,

as the creation of international knowledge networks involves coordination problems not different

from those associated with the production of other public goods. In other words, many smaller

organizations, developing country researchers and research institutes may be committed to its

subsistence, once such a network exists, but not enough of them will invest in their creation

when the probabilities of success are highly uncertain and the returns seem non-rival and non-

excludable. On the second criticism, we do not want to stress here the initial limitation, but

would like to call attention to the uncharacteristic ulterior response: ever since the first GDN

meetings, efforts have been deliberately made to include other disciplines and even to

institutionalize multidisciplinarity, in the conviction that it will further the network’s goals

(Johnson and Stone, 2000). In sum, those two criticisms are only re-stated here to signal some

more general problems in establishing international cooperative arrangements to strengthen

8 On the project “Bridging research and policy” and RAPNet, see

http://www.gdnet.org/subpages/projects_underresearch.html9 The focus on think tanks to the relative neglect of other forms of support for research did not go

unquestioned. See, for example, Lindquist (2000), p. 235-36.


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PESKS in developing countries, and the types of responses that prevailing thinking tends to

produce. Alternative approaches are justified and discussed in the sections below.

The GDN’s research activities also illustrate some standard conceptions about research

agendas and the organization of international research efforts in an increasingly globalized world.On one hand, the network’s first global projects (on determinants of growth, the political

economy of reforms, and bridging research and policy) have the customary format of

comparative projects sponsored by large international organizations, in which the broader

design and key thematic and synthesis papers are produced by internationally recognized

experts (frequently from the North), and case studies are done by developing country

partners.10 The purpose of these projects is normally to identify transferable lessons, as well as

the contingent conditions that make those lessons applicable to other contexts. On the other

hand, the goal of supporting locally relevant research has been pursued in GDN through the

periodic awarding of regional grants, allocated to individuals and institutions on the basis of a

competitive, peer-review mechanism (Johnson and Stone, 2000).11

At first sight, many of these specific activities seem uncontroversial and even laudable.

They are possibly worth pursuing, to some extent, in any reasonable scenario. However, some

limitations of the underlying approaches will become clearer after synthesizing new knowledge

on high-quality growth and institutions, on democratic policy-making, and on the organization of

successful innovation systems. Among those comparative research projects, the one entitled

“Understanding Reform” has been one of the flagship initiatives in GDN’s early portfolio of

activities. To GDN’s management credit, its research agenda was developed through a

participatory process open almost to anyone with an internet connection and the ability to

read/write in English –which isn’t everybody that matters in reforms processes in the developing

world, but is significantly more than many other similar endeavors allow in terms of participation.

The project defines “reforms” with a clear and sensible analytical purpose:

10 See www.gdnet.org

11 The then vice president and chief economist of the World Bank has been credited with pushing for

support to the generation of locally relevant research (Stone, 2000), which is consistent with his ambitious

(and less than consensual) vision for GDN (Stiglitz, 2000).


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In the context of this project, the ‘reform to be understood’ is defined in an inductive

manner—that is, what actually happened in the last twenty years—rather than projecting

towards some subjectively determined preferred policies. Accordingly, the word

‘reform’ in this document refers to movements towards more market oriented economic

systems, usually in the context of more open political systems. (GDN, 2002, p. 1)

The proposal, and its ongoing implementation, reveal the variety of concerns that

participants in the real and virtual meetings had in mind, coming as they did from throughout the

world and various trades. For example, the proposal’s “Background” section lists nineteen

pertinent questions identified through the consultations, going from the broadest and more

fundamental (e.g., “Is the end goal for all countries the same—despite a wide variety of paths—

or are different forms of capitalism more effective in different countries?”) to the more

instrumental ones (e.g., “What is the role of the provision of information in the reform

process?”). Yet, the project objectives reveal a more focused goal and approach, which is by

not means exclusive to GDN but shared with much of what comes under the rubric of “new

political economy” perspectives on public policy (see, e.g., Persson and Tabellini, 2000;

Drazen, 2000). The general objective of the project is stated to be “to increase the body of

knowledge for the design and implementation of future reform efforts, including lessons learned

and good practices.”.12 Its specific objectives are:

- To analyze the causes and timing of reform programs, including both external and

internal factors.

- To provide analysis and evidence of reasons for the success and failure of reform

efforts around the globe for countries with different initial conditions and different

external environments and influences.

- To provide analysis and evidence of the role of agents in the design, implementation,

and outcomes of reform programs, as well as methods used to bring agents explicitly

into the process in a constructive manner.

- To provide strong evidence of the importance of the interaction of various forces—

such as culture, society, economics, politics, and law—for the design, implementation,and outcome of reform programs.

- To assess the social costs and benefits of reform processes.

- To assess the role of the state in reducing the costs of and increasing the benefits to

poorer income classes, income minority and other disadvantaged groups.

12 http://www.gdnet.org/subpages/projects_underreform.html


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- To increase the domestic capacity to undertake research related to major economic

and political reform in developing and transition countries.

As will be argued later, valuable as the new empirical evidence and analysis comingfrom this project will undoubtedly be, the perspective that informs the above stated objectives

places policy researchers in developing countries, and the knowledge that they produce, in a

position that to some extent hinders rather than helps their chances of contributing to better

policy-making. It must be reiterated that this quick review of specific initiatives has the only

purpose of illustrating some shared premises of recent development practice and thinking that

the ensuing argument aims to question. It definitely does not intend to be a critique of concrete

complex, multifaceted, and evolving entities and endeavors, that usually have to deal with

multiple imperatives and constraints, and whose emergent characteristics are frequently of

nobody’s or no single organization’s making. In the same style, some further elements of the

conventional thinking can be identified in the emerging new approach to trade-related capacity

building.

Trade-related capacity building is a burgeoning field that has emerged and evolved out

of increased awareness of the relevance and importance of trade for development (Prowse,

2002). The evolution of the multilateral trading system in the last decade and a half has

generated new challenges for developing countries, in terms of articulating and carrying forward

negotiating strategies, implementing commitments made at multilateral, regional or bilateral

levels, and seizing opportunities (and coping with potentially adverse effects) created by changes

in market access and other trade disciplines. Multilateral agencies and developed countries have

recognized the daunting demands on the already strained capacities of poorer countries –

although perhaps not fully--, and have devised a series of mechanisms to support them in those

complex endeavors.

In recent years, and consistent with a new approach to development and poverty

reduction (Maxwell, 2003), there has been a tendency to seek enhanced coordination of

apparently disjoint approaches to trade-related capacity building by various multilateral and

bilateral agencies (De Silva and Weston, 2002; Prowse, 2002), and to integrate those strategies


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more fully in a “comprehensive development framework” and with the production of Poverty

Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) now required by the World Bank and the International

Monetary Fund for concessional lending and debt reduction to the world’s poorest countries

(see www.worldbank.org/cdf and UNCTAD, 2002). The range of activities encompassed bythe concept of trade-related capacity building –traditionally referred to as “technical

assistance”— includes support for trade facilitation (customs administration); external trade data

collation; training of private sector representatives and analysis to enhance private sector

participation in policy-making; training of officials in trade negotiations and implementation of

commitments, accession advice and customs administration; support for sector-specific reforms

in response to emerging trade challenges or opportunities; proactive linking of think tanks and

policy makers and advocacy; and the provision of systematic trade flows data and information

on the functioning of the multilateral system.

Clearly, technical assistance, or trade-related capacity building, are not the same as

research (Joekes and Medhora, 2001b), and tend to involve developing countries’ PESKS in a

relatively marginal way. Nevertheless, some elements of the recent strategies deserve mentioning

because they reflect the same kind of thinking of international development players on the role of

knowledge in institutional change –even many of the key international actors are the same as

those involved in supporting local PESKS. First, it is conventionally assumed that greater donor

coordination is beneficial to the recipients of aid and technical assistance. Accountability to

donor countries’ taxpayers and efficiency considerations seem to lead logically in that direction.

Second, it seems sensible to require countries that benefit from sustained and significant

international aid to have a broader “poverty reduction strategy”, and to develop sectoral

strategies that are consistent with it. With the same logic, it appears reasonable for donors to

focus attention on actual results (i.e., social and economic performance) rather than on process

indicators (e.g., public expenditure in programs supposedly aimed at reducing poverty; see

Maxwell, 2003). As will be argued below, some of these apparently sensible strategies embody

principles that may be inconsistent with what is known about the nature of institutions for high-

quality growth; they may create tensions in other fronts of institution building that will appear,

under new light, prioritary; and they may hamper, rather than clear the path to the establishment


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of knowledge systems that facilitate social learning. The following section reviews the three

streams of scholarship that will produce that necessary new light on the challenge of building

effective PESKS in developing countries.

I nstitu tions, democrati c poli cy-making, and knowledge systems

1. Institutions for high-quality growth

The first research body to be considered is the one concerned with the nature of the

“domestic” institutions that foster high-quality growth. A research program has been forcefully

put forward by Dani Rodrik and collaborators, which has already produced a number of

lessons that challenge more traditional approaches to development. Detailed discussions of

constituent elements and substantial empirical evidence are contained in a number of

publications (e.g., Rodrik 1999, 2000a). The main findings are conveniently summarized in two

recent papers (Rodrik 2000b, 2002). A bare bones version of the analytical argument, which

reflects the synthesis of a large body of empirical and analytical work, involves four initial

propositions:

(a) high-quality growth requires an assortment of non-market institutions that

support, complement and embed markets;

(b) there is not a unique mapping between markets and the non-market institutions

that underpin them;

(c) high-quality growth is promoted or hindered by the specific combination of

supporting and embedding non-market institutions, and the peculiarities of markets

in a specific time and place, and not by the respective distances between each

individual supporting institution and some ideal model; and

(d) the right combinations of institutions for high-quality growth is context-specific, i.e.,

it will vary across countries and within countries over time.


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At a lower level of generality, Rodrik argues that institutions for high-quality growth are

those that successfully deal with five key challenges in any country’s development process. The

challenges include providing entrepreneurs adequate control over the returns to the assets that

are created or improved through accumulation and innovation; regulating markets to curb theworst forms of fraud, anti-competitive behavior, and moral hazard; stabilizing key

macroeconomic aggregates; providing social insurance against idiosyncratic risk to incomes and

employment, which tend to become less manageable at the household or community level in a

process of rapid economic expansion; and managing social conflict (Rodrik, 2000). One may

want to argue with this list, propose additions or deletions, but the most important message of

this body of research is to shift the focus of attention to functions that must be served by

complex configurations of interrelated institutions, rather than focusing on the similarity of various

specific institutions with theoretically informed, or empirically identified sectoral “best practices”

(e.g., on the extent of state ownership of productive means, the nature of the law and judicial

system, or the regulation of labor market relations).13

This said, there is a fifth key proposition to the whole program on institutions for high-

quality growth. It states that the relevant institutional configurations inevitably embody a

collective conception of long term goals and of preferred ways of organizing the many aspects

of social life and that, therefore, institutions of democratic governance have a key role to play in

eliciting and aggregating social preferences, and in guiding a collective experimentation process

to find the right configuration for each society. This latter notion that democratic or

“participatory” political institutions provide an effective search algorithm for identifying the

institutional configurations that best suit a society is shared by others; notably, Stiglitz (2000).

13 In various writings, Rodrik and collaborators have cited and offered a wealth of case studies and cross-

country statistical evidence, from the experience of now developed countries and developing countries

alike, showing the lack of direct, simple correlation between specific institutional arrangements in some realm

and the overall country performance in terms of growth and distribution. On trade policy, for example, see

Rodrik (1999), and Rodrígues and Rodrik (1999). For a case study of the costly mistakes that can result from

the piecemeal approach to introducing the “right” institutions, see McMillan, Rodrik and Welch (2002).

More work definitely needs to be done to flesh out more clearly what is the precise nature of the “functions”

to be served by institutions and how the “emergent” properties of institutional configurations can be

identified, assessed, and linked to the nuts and bolts of a country’s institutional architecture.


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Rodrik and Stiglitz elaborate on the specific challenges of building institutions for high-

quality growth that seem to relate to the greater effectiveness of democratic policy-making in

acquiring them. While the first emphasizes the context-specificity and value-ladenness of

socioeconomic institutional configurations (Rodrik 2000b, pp. 13-14), the latter states similarand related concerns by stressing that the relevant knowledge for development has

demonstrated to be local, largely tacit, and requires society to assume an active role in the

learning process (Stiglitz, 2000, p 30). These observations, particularly on the interrelation of

institutions with other aspects of social context and the tacit nature of much of the relevant

knowledge to build and reform institutions, have been confirmed by work on the effects of

“legal transplantation” and the conditions under which it seems to work or fail (Berkowitz,

Pistor and Richard, 2000; Pistor, 2000).

Rodrik digs deeper in untangling the relations between political regime and

development, by demonstrating empirically that there are noticeable differences in

socioeconomic performance associated with the degree to which a political system is open to

participation. The results so far seem to be fairly summarized by the assertion that democracy is

no shortcut to higher long run growth, but it does provide much better means to moderating

costly volatility, handling adverse shocks, and distributing more equitably the gains from

economic expansion (Rodrik, 2000b). As Stiglitz has put it, “we should value democratic

institutions as an end in themselves, not just as a means to more successful development”

(Stiglitz, 2000, p. 26), but it is already high time that empirical and analytical work start

producing evidence and suggesting reasons for the apparent evolutionary superiority of

participatory institutions in social environments so much dominated by concerns with material

well-being.

Neither Stiglitz nor Rodrik, however, have gone beyond some general observations

about the reasons why democratic policy-making is a superior road to acquiring institutions that

are better suited to the medium term challenges of complex societies; or, in other words, about

what accounts for “the intelligence of democracy”. In addition to professional specialization

(and perhaps because of it), the reasons for their relative omission may have something to do


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with their adherence to a paradigm that entails great confidence in the human ability to identify

and pursue optimal solutions. To more realistic frameworks we now turn.

2. The bounded rationality of policy-making and the intelligence of democracy

Charles Lindblom’s intellectual career looks like a lifelong mission to dispel both

unfounded criticisms as well as unwarranted expectations about the functioning of democracies,

and it must be recognized for the significant contribution to a realistic understanding of what

democratic governance promises and can be expected deliver. His work –perhaps best

synthesized in the last edition of his The Policy-Making Process (Lindblom and Woodhouse,

1993)—has contributed to illuminate the mechanisms that account for the superiority of

democratic policy-making over the alternative of analysis-led, centralized policy-making. Many

of his ideas can be seen to have been rescued and perfected, if perhaps in different guise, by

more recent analysts of the policy-making process.14

Lindblom has tackled some of the more fundamental questions directly, such as, for

example, the question of whether “analysis” by itself can ever be expected to provide adequate

solutions to complex policy problems, and eventually be a preferable road to improved

management of social affairs than the messy business of democratic policy-making (Lindblom

and Woodhouse, 1993, Chapter 2). The well-substantiated answer is an emphatic no. The first

step to appreciating the limits of analysis is to acknowledge the irreducible incompleteness and

fallibility of all scientific knowledge on which such analysis would ideally be based. If the general

point has become increasingly hard to dispute for even the “hard” natural sciences (Collins and

Pinch, 1993), Lindblom has for many years been arguing it for the social sciences on which the

making of social and economic policies would be supposed to rely. Not only the available

scientific responses to specific questions must always be taken as established only to a certain

degree of confidence, but the sciences will normally have addressed only a subset of the

14 See, for example, Kingdon (1995) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1999).


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relevant questions surrounding a policy issue that must be resolved.15 While in principle a larger

number of the relevant questions could be answered through more research and analysis,

adequately completing the decision-makers’ knowledge base may require more time and/or

resources than available or justifiable by the choice situation.

16

In view of these limitations, thelay public and policy makers are well advised to take “analyses” offered to them with more than

a grain of salt.

A second key limitation of analysis is that there will normally be no easily reachable

consensus on what is the fundamental problem to be solved, and therefore what is that needs to

be analyzed. For example,

When riots break out in Los Angeles, what is the “real” problem: decline of law and

order? racial and ethnic discrimination? poverty and joblessness? family disintegration?

poor policy training? And what are the causes of these problems? (Lindblom and

Woodhouse, 1993, p. 21)

In general, in complex self-referential systems as human societies are, there is no single way of

formulating problems or prioritizing them that is “analytically right”. This limitation of analysis is

connected to a third and equally fundamental one. In most of the relevant policy situations, there

will inevitably be conflicts of values and no analytical solution so as to how they should be

resolved. Even if it were possible for a society to agree on a single explanation of all the causal

mechanisms surrounding a policy problem, on the soundness of the evidence that supports it,

and on the likely consequences of alternative policy options, stake-holders are probably going

to disagree on the solutions because they are likely to be affected differently by them (unless the

problem is trivial). Decades of research in social choice theory have produced some partial

responses to the problem of choosing among policies in this context, but none that has come to

15

Their example of the usual “incompleteness” of social science knowledge when societies arrive at critical policy crossroads is also pertinent to our concern with the construction of institutions for high-quality

growth: in the view of Lindblom and Woodhouse, “the formerly communist nations are merely copying

western-style political and economic systems instead of taking advantage of the social flexibility in eastern

Europe to try out new political and economic arrangements… Part of the reason is that European and

American social scientists had not developed sufficiently detailed and helpful alternatives.” (p. 16)16

Lindblom has also been among those that has questioned the value of studying the policy-making

process as a sequence of distinct and logically sequenced steps, from problem emergence, t hrough policy

formulation, decision making, implementation, to evaluation. For an updated review of the literature see

Sutton (1999); see also Juma and Clark (1995).


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be generally accepted as the solution to this fundamental political problem.17 For all these

reasons, analysis, or the scientific formulation of policies, does not appear as a sensible

substitute for democratic policy-making.

However, the fact that analysis has limits does not in itself demonstrate the superiority ofdemocratic policy-making. A closer look at how democratic policy-making operates would be

required to demonstrate the “intelligence of democracy” –a tall order, indeed, given the

apparent folly of many of the choices made by fully democratic societies and governments. In

Lindblom and Woodhouse’s view, the intelligence of democracy resides in it promoting

agreement rather than –an apparently impossible—shared understanding. If an intelligent

political process is one that takes into account non-trivially the concerns of sizeable groups of a

society (i.e., is “responsive”), that manages sensibly the usual tradeoffs in seeking multiple goals,

and that, insofar as possible, takes into account available information (about problems,

opportunities, performance of existing policies, etc.), democracies can be said to achieve

intelligent policy-making, at least more frequently than non-democratic regimes (p. 25).

The key to intelligent decision making by democracies –and, in the same line, to

intelligent search for pro-development institutions—is the interaction among political participants

that do not share a dominant common purpose (other, perhaps, than their commitment to

playing by the rules of the democratic game). Interestingly enough, intelligent decision making

does not require participants to overcome their partial, incomplete understanding of the

problems, or their partisan approach to the solutions. Interactions among partisan and

cognitively limited participants will produce responsive solutions, based on a sensible

management of tradeoffs, and will incorporate a significant amount of available information (i.e.,

will yield “intelligent” choices), without nobody really “understanding” the problem (or in fact

producing a form of understanding that no single “analysis” is able to produce). In successful

democratic policy-making, “there is never a point at which the thinking, research, and action is

‘objective’, or ‘unbiased’. It is partisan through and through, as are all human activities” (pp.

31-32).

17 The classic in this literature is, of course, Arrow (1951). See also Sen (1986).


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On close scrutiny, the interaction of partisan participants in fact produces a form of

“strategic analysis” through distributing processing of information and the forcing of agreements.

In The Policy-Making Process, Lindblom and Woodhouse argue that democratic policy-

making allows societies to simplify and “solve” complex problems, by operating through simpleincremental analysis (which is time-efficient, and uses what normally constitutes the best

available knowledge which is knowledge of past experience), focusing on few policy options

(rather than being potentially paralyzed by an attempt to compute all the possible scenarios and

options), focusing mostly on ills to be remedied, and proceeding through trial and error (pp. 29-

30).18 A great deal of recent empirical work and many of the most promising approaches to the

policy-making process can be made compatible with this broader and older framework, as

illustrated in the references added to the revised third edition.

However, it would be fair to wonder how these apparently promising problem-solving

strategies could be reconciled with the obvious fact that democracies adopt apparently “wrong”

policies, that waste resources or seem to neglect the most basic needs of so many people

unjustly relegated to indigence. The key here is to recognize that decisions so arrived are going

to be boundedly rational. Those choices cannot ever be “optimal” (if the term had an

unambiguous meaning in social choice contexts) nor “substantively rational” (in Herbert Simon’s

famous words; Simon, 1976). Still, democracies tend in general to produce systematically and

persistently wrong policies less often than non-democratic regimes (see, e.g., Sen, 19XX). In

general, fewer decision-making actors –even if assisted by the best available science—will tend

to neglect aspects of the problem. When the inevitable fallibility and value-ladenness of

technically developed solutions is added, the superiority of decentralized information gathering

and decision-making through negotiated agreement becomes really plausible. Lindauer and

18 Cyert and March (1963) had earlier demonstrated that even smaller, more hierarchical organizations, end

up behaving similarly, essentially because the challenges of decision making in complex dynamic

environments prevents them from attempting more than doing “good enough” –given some more or less

precisely defined objectives and satisficing thresholds. Mosley (1976, 1984) has shown that resourceful and

sophisticated democratic governments, in relatively “technical” and typically non-participatory policy areas

such as the management of stabilization policy, also behave similarly. Conlisk (1996) is a good recent

synthesis of the reasons why even professional academic economists ought to think more seriously about

bounded rationality, why Sargent (1993) represents just one of various striking examples of how apparently

old-fashioned hypotheses have resurfaced in recent years.


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Pritchett (2002) further illustrate the risk of expecting technically-driven decision-making by

non-participatory means to solve any complex social problems: in many policy areas, and in

development policy in particular, conventional wisdoms can be shown to move in a pendular

fashion, following big swings in the underlying conditions that made a certain paradigm lookadequate. When this happens, even social scientists tend to neglect issues, “bundle” analytically

separable policy options, and change the focus of attention on empirical evidence more or less

arbitrarily. This “bounded rationality” of policy analysis only reinforces the worries about power

concentration in the hands of those who know (or are supposed to know) best.

While democratic decision making can make use of distributed knowledge and can

count on participation by multiple partisan actors to avoid neglecting key problems for too long,

we should not hold unrealistic expectations about the choices emerging from democratic policy-

making. In fact, The Policy-Making Process offers some disquieting illustrations of the risks of

democratic decision making being derailed by the influence of bureaucratic capture, economic

and political inequality, or the imperfection of voting mechanisms. To the extent that the

intelligence of systems varies with their specific institutional configurations (p. 55), there are

reasons to hope that the intelligence of real world democracies can be enhanced through

political and bureaucratic reform. This will not avoid the intrinsic “imperfection” of democratic

policy-making, and the adequate limits of participatory decision-making, vis-à-vis delegation to

“technical” agencies, will have to be explored and decided adaptively. Moreover, there may be

significant space for improving on democratic decision-making by making more effective use of

systematically gathered information and research-based knowledge.

3. The new organization of successful innovation systems

Without perhaps fully agreeing on the novelty of the process –some could argue that

what is novel is the way science studies scholars approach the issues--, a new picture has been


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emerging in recent years of the organization of effective innovation systems and the production

of knowledge for the solution of concrete social or technological problems. While this new

perspective has been informing concrete efforts to reorganize, for example, the way international

environmental assessments are produced (ICSU, 2002), it has been very slow to permeatethinking and practice on the organization of economic and social research to support institution

building in development. This relative neglect, as the inattention to lessons on institutions and

high-quality growth or on the potential and limits of participatory policy-making, may be

preventing investments of resources and effort from realizing their full potential.

The seminal articulation of the emerging new perspective, and the argument about the

novelty of the processes observed, was offered by Gibbons et al. (1994). These authors

propose that a new mode of organization of knowledge production has been emerging in the last

couple of decades, and that its distinctive characteristics are more clearly discernible in the most

dynamic and creative knowledge-based industries and research fields. A number of features

would distinguish this new mode from the one that prevailed during most of the XXth century.

First, in the new mode, knowledge is generated mainly in the context of application, while in the

previous mode it was the cognitive and social norms of academic disciplines that primarily

determined the dynamics of knowledge production. Second, the new problem-oriented

research tends to be transdisciplinary by the very nature of the situation that motivates it, which

is primarily to solve concrete real world problems rather than answer disciplinary valid

questions. Transdisciplinarity, in the new mode of knowledge production, involves the

generation of new, provisional consensus on cognitive and social practice appropriate to tackle

the problems of interest –rather than simply assembling disciplinary diverse teams that still look

at the problem from each individual disciplines’ perspectives--, and these consensus tend to be

tacitly more than explicitly arrived at and communicated. Third, the new production of

knowledge is characterized by the heterogeneity of the institutional landscape in which it

operates (including also a greater variety of funding sources), with universities or formal research

institutes no longer being the privileged sites (though they still play a key role in a broader and

more diverse landscape characterized by temporary inter-institutional partnerships). Fourth, the

new mode is characterized by much greater accountability to relevant stake-holders, and


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reflexivity about the implications of the knowledge being generated and the limits of scientifically

produced certainties. Fifth, the new mode of production of knowledge involves new

mechanisms of quality control and validation of the knowledge generated, consistent with its

problem-oriented nature. While in the previous mode peer review was the quintessentialvalidation mechanism to define what is worth studying and who is qualified to pursue the

answers, in the new mode there is a wider set of criteria to judge quality and allocate resources

to research –including most prominently the “usefulness” of the knowledge to the collective

solution of the initial and subsequent problems. The new quality control and validation

mechanisms do not give up the quest for technical excellence, but technical strength per se

weights less in the new mode of knowledge production.

While inductively derived from empirical work on successful innovation systems, the

features of the new mode of knowledge production are, perhaps not surprisingly, more

compatible with contemporary epistemological reflection on the sources of strength of scientific

knowledge and its newly appreciated limits (Collins and Pinch, 1993; Restivo, 1994; Gibbons,

1999; Hands, 2001). Although not concerned primarily with the social sciences, some of the

“policy” implications identified by Gibbons and collaborators seem quite relevant to the

challenge of organizing PESKS to support the development of new social technologies (i.e.,

institutions). They include a recognition of the pivotal role of networks and the search for

policies to encourage and facilitate communications (“density of communications” being one of

their indicators of success); a greater openness to the participation of the relevant stakeholders

in problem definition and validation of results; a de-centering of science policies (traditionally

focused on support to universities or other university-like research institutes); a new role for

government science agencies as brokers in knowledge games and regulators of competition and

cooperation among and within networks; and generally a necessary revision of education

policies, science and technologies policy, and competition policies.

Interestingly enough, recent empirical research on the effectiveness of scientific

environmental assessments in influencing global policy-making has shown the greater impact of

the research-for-policy endeavors that conform better to the features of the new mode of

knowledge production. They also highlight the role of knowledge systems institutions in affecting


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effectiveness. Based on a program of work that has taken them many years of tracking scientific

environmental assessments and their impact on choices made at the international level, Clark et

al (2002) start by pointing that influential assessments are the exception rather than the rule.

“The most influential assessments”, they argue, “are those that are simultaneously perceived bya broad array of actors to possess three attributes: saliency, credibility, and legitimacy” (p. 7,

emphasis added). The three attributes connect logically with features of the new mode of

successful innovation identified by Gibbons et al., and this should not be surprising since what is

at stake in global environmental policy-making is precisely social innovation at a grand scale.

“Salience” points to the problem-oriented nature of knowledge that is effectively used,

as a non-salient question is a no-problem for complex decision making entities –however

important it might appear to analysts.19

In turn, “credibility” and “legitimacy” relate directly to

the new meaning of “quality control” and “validation” in the new mode of knowledge

production. The first of these two attributes is defined as “whether an actor perceives the

assessment’s arguments to meet standards of scientific plausibility and technical adequacy”

(Clark et al., p. 7). In brief, to be taken up by decision-makers, the assessment must be

recognizable as “good science”. However, the authors whole point is that credibility by itself is

not enough: while addressing questions relevant to the actors’ present choice situation,

assessments must be simultaneously perceived as credible and legitimate, with “legitimacy”

defined as “whether an actor perceives the assessment as unbiased and meeting standards of

political fairness” (p. 7, emphasis added). Specifically, some assessments that have been too

stringent in deciding who has the right to participate, based on the standard indicators of

scientific competence, have failed miserably to be influential because they have been perceived

as illegitimate (Cash and Clark, 2001).

Most relevant for our present concerns, the extensive empirical work of Clark and

collaborators has led them to conclude that the inevitable tradeoffs that occur when attempting

to enhance the perceived salience, credibility, or legitimacy of an assessment are usually

19 It is not hard to relate “saliency” to our previous discussion of the problem-solving strategies of

democracy, which highlighted the importance of research-based knowledge being available when the policy-

making system has turned its limited attention to a problem. See also Kingdon (1995).


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may have the attributes of “democracies” but retain several elements of authoritarian decision-

making (O'Donnell, 1994). As Lindblom has argued, the intelligence of a regime depends on its

specific institutional configuration, and the relevant institutions to consider include regularized

patterns of interaction that are not written in any law but can only become accepted throughrepeated interaction among the participants. In other words, while democratic policy-making is

required to search more effectively for institutions of socioeconomic organization, democratic

policy-making institutions can only be acquired through persistent trial-and-error and

adaptation, within the imperfect political rules that any existing regime is likely to have.

What from other perspectives could be considered a limitation of participatory policy-

making –that is, its potential inability to adopt analytically “best” solutions to policy problems—

is in this new framework a source of strength. On one hand, incrementalism and adaptive

learning become a bonus in the face of more honest epistemological accounts of the power of

science. From the perspective of identifying institutions for high-quality growth, the context-

dependence of any particular or sectoral arrangement’s performance determines a revalorization

of incrementalism. Incremental institutional change is the ideal learning strategy for complex

decision-making entities –democracies—to incorporate new information on the fit of newly

acquired institutions with previously existing ones and with those others that may be starting to

change. This gradualism, in turn, may facilitate the mutual adjustment and –inevitably slow—

learning by partisan actors, which are necessary to consolidate acceptance of the democratic

rules of the political game.

Participatory decision-making is not without costs, but then no known political

mechanism is. In some areas (e.g., the management of monetary policy, the application and

enforcement of competition codes) it may seem that the technical difficulties involved would

prevent decision making by participatory mechanisms. In others, it may appear that the need

from prompt timely action prevents the degree of consultation that “participatory” seems to

entail, or that broad-based consultation may neglect the interest of suffering and politically weak

segments (e.g., on poverty reduction or poverty alleviation policies). However, this apparent

dismissal of democratic decision-making for certain policy areas is frequently based on a wrong

appreciation of what “democratic policy-making” entails: no democratic regime that is viable in


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today’s world environment can submit each and every socioeconomically relevant issue to the

decision of the electorate. What seems to matter in the long run is that even the apparently more

technical realms of policy-making remain open to scrutiny and ultimately accountable to the

political body. This may mean different degrees of political oversight and flexibility of thedelegation “contracts” with executive agencies. Those degrees will make a difference on the

“responsiveness” of the system as well as on their effectiveness. Yet, what the literature on

institutions and economic performance and the literature on democratic policy-making forcefully

demonstrate is that no “auto-pilot” solutions promote high-quality growth, to a good extent

because no science that we know can anticipate all the contingencies that a society will have to

confront even in a relatively near future.21

In this perspective, social science research can certainly help to produce “more

intelligent” (i.e., responsive, sensible about tradeoffs, and well-informed) policy-making but it

may need to be organized differently than commonly assumed. We now turn to a brief review of

the specific implications for developing country actors and for international participants in the

effort to establish pro-development PESKS. A necessary caveat is that the recommendations

below tend to focus on the more applied, or problem-driven segments of research. The limited

consideration given to basic social sciences research is not meant to detract from its value, but

reflects the relative priority given to the former in recent international efforts to build research

capacity in the developing world.22

1. Implications for developing countries’ actors

21 For a recent articulation of “auto-pilot” solutions for the management of monetary policy in some

developing countries, see Sachs (2002); for the inevitability of inconsistency in a rapidly evolving

environment, even within a single analyst’s internally consistent frameworks, see Dornbusch (2000) and

Rius (forthcoming).22

The applied-vs.-basic distinction seems to take us back to the old modes of organization of research that

were previously questioned. Gibbons et al. (1994), however, recognize the current coexistence of the two

modes, and the need to think about their ongoing interactions. Basic social science for development seems

to involve specific challenges that cannot be duly covered here.


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Taken together, the three literatures reviewed above have implications for the formation

and contents of research agendas in developing countries’ PESKS, as well as for the

organization of those knowledge systems and the role of external supporting agents. Table 1

summarizes the implications for developing country researchers, managers of research institutesand science agencies, and for policy makers. It compares them to those flowing from the

conventional wisdom, so as to highlight some novel implications of the proposed approach.

However, in several cases it will become clear that the difference between the two approaches

is more one of emphases than of substituting one strategy for another. In several other cases, the

proposed alternative is not entirely novel, although it may not have been articulated before in

similar terms.


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Table 1

Implications for developing country actors:

Conventional wisdom vs. alternative approach

Area of intervention Conventional wisdom Alternative approach

Research agendas

Poli tically antiseptic Politically embedded

* democratization as background,

reforms as focus

* democratic consolidation prior

to other institution-building goals

* substantive rationality of policy

process is implicitly expected

* bounded rationality assumed

(including uncertainties

surrounding technical knowledge)

* New Political Economy

perspective: partisan political

competition as constraint

* research agendas arise from

ongoing collaboration with “real

world” political actors* status quo measured against

ideal solutions or “best practice”

* path dependence recognized,

deep exploration within the range

of politically feasible options

Disciplinary relevant Problem-oriented

* peer endorsed questions and

approaches

* problem situation and

stakeholders shape questions and

approaches (researchers actively

engaged, but do not necessarily

lead)

Organization of research

industry

Disciplinary, technically

oriented

Problem-oriented

* geared at producing reliable

knowledge

* geared at producing socially

robust knowledge

* focus on outputs (e.g.,

publications as indicators)

* focus on process (ongoing) and

density of communications

Build internationally up to par

institutes/centers

Build diverse distributed systems

* HR policies geared at

developing disciplinary

qualifications

* HR policies geared at

developing disciplinary

qualifications and fungibility

* few sites of knowledge

production, efficiency

* multiple sites assumed, tolerate

some redundancy

The contents of much research for development that is produced in international

networks or at the local level in developing countries may need to change, in light of the lessons

summarized above. While a vast majority of that research recognizes that democratization is a


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desirable process that often occurs in parallel with necessary institutional reforms to foster

socioeconomic advancement, too little of that research makes the consolidation of democracy a

key objective, at par or even prior to any other institutional reform objectives. In light of the

literatures reviewed above, it would be justifiable and sensible to postpone consideration ofcertain apparently promising economic or social reforms if there was any evidence that they

could create tensions that a weakly consolidated democracy might not be able to bear. Yet,

almost no of the research on reforms consistently applies this “democratic consolidation test” to

its analyses. Moreover, when some recent “political economy” approaches are adopted, the

institutions of democratic policy-making are all too often characterized (frequently with very little

care for the local specificity of political rules of the game) as constraints that must be recognized

by “reformist” policy-makers to succeed, rather than as the object that needs to be preserved

and perfected for ongoing social learning and adaptation in the building of pro-development

institutions.23

Most developing country social science researchers or managers of research institutes

will feel insulted by the suggestion that their work undermines democratic consolidation.

However, conventional approaches to producing knowledge for institutional reform frequently

have the unintended effect of exacerbating tensions that weakly consolidated democracies

would rather do without. That happens, for example, when “independent” think tanks produce

research on possible institutional innovations in some specific policy area that takes the form of

comparisons between the status quo with the putative benefits of some theoretical model, or the

apparent international “best practice”. This approach is not only often ignorant of the context-

dependence of specific institutions’ performance, but it also has the added effect of portraying

policy makers, who usually struggle to do “well enough” within the realm of the politically

feasible, as incompetent or servile to special interest. This is not to diminish the value of research

that demonstrates the often perverse effects of institutional inertia, or to argue that only research

23 Consider, for example, the defense of “shock therapy” in XXXX. For a counter-argument, see O’Donnell

(1995) and Rodrik (1996). See also Haughton (1998). The reasoning in favor of swift economic reform that

relegates democratic consolidation to a second order consideration frequently assumes that democratization

will eventually be stimulated by liberalizing reforms and the putative expansion in economic opportunity.


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that is demanded by partisan participants should be justified, but to argue that, as with global

environmental assessments, research to support social learning for institutional innovation must

be politically legitimate and cognizant of the volatility of issue saliency, to be effective. This

requires new approaches to research agenda formulation, and social scientists convinced of thesuperiority of certain policy agendas should be prepared to engage with –rather than just

challenge—the partisan participants of the democratic process.

As suggested by Gibbons et al. (1994), research managers and managers of science

agencies have a new key role to play in brokering innovative partnership arrangements between

social sciences research institutions and the intended users (government agencies, political

parties or their legislative delegations, civil society organizations) of research for institutional

change. While “networks” are the current mantra in the knowledge-for-development world, the

perspective advocated here implies that in many cases there will be a need to revise the

membership and shift the center of gravity of those networks: research networks should

become much more distinctively multi-stakeholder policy networks (Reinicke and Deng, 2000;

Joekes and Medhora, 2001a), and “research users” should be given more leverage over their

priority-setting. The latter has been accepted as a sound approach to fostering technological

innovation in developing countries (Mayorga, 1997), but it is far less than normal practice in the

organization and funding of the social sciences to support policy-making.

The necessary political embeddedness of social research to ensure that it supports

decision making may seem to undermine the required objectivity or rigor of social “science”.

This view, however, not only fails to recognize the real nature of objectivity in any science

(Restivo, 1994), but it also reduces arbitrarily the variety of possible arrangements to be

worked out with partisan political actors. To reflect the need for mutual understanding of each

others’ needs, aspirations, and constraints; and to demonstrate the ongoing nature of the

interaction, researchers in the field of environmental sciences and the global environmental

assessments have designated the new forms of stakeholder-researchers partnerships as “co-

production dialogues” (Clark et al., 2003). Through those dialogues, “engaged” research

There is little need to emphasize that the assumption has been dramatically proven wrong in too many

developing countries in recent years.


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producers and research users can expect to expand the levels of intelligence in decision-making

through negotiation and mutual adjustment, rather than leveling down the intelligence of scientific

analysis. What seems clearer under the light of the literatures reviewed is that there should be a

more limited constructive role for “independent”, “sniper” type of think tanks, and for researchthat fails to meaningfully incorporate knowledge of the real choice situations faced by political

actors.

Another set of implications concern specifically the institutional organization of PESKS.

In the conventional wisdom, it makes sense to work towards ensuring that countries have a few

sites of knowledge production that are up to par with global disciplinary social science, can

interpret, adapt and produce similar research, and can feed it to a broad audience or to

governments. In the alternative approach, the social learning that has to occur requires diverse,

distributed systems of knowledge generation. In other words, it enhances the quality of

democratic policy-making if actors that are partisan and do not trust or agree with other actors’

analyses can also rely on their own trusted sources of evidence-based analysis. Of course they

will be tradeoffs between feeding these partisan actors with trustworthy analyses while at the

same time striving to keep them technically sound, but there is no simple substitute for a diverse

constellation of sites of knowledge production that work with partisan actors. Science policy

managers, therefore, may need to accept some apparent redundancy in PESKS and do not

attempt to over-rationalize their organization by, perhaps, concentrating all resources in single

sites or modalities. The new perspective also implies that diversity in the sources of funding may

be a good thing, and not just –as frequently seen today—an undesirable upshot of the decline in

public funding for higher education and research (Calderón and Provoste, 1990).24

Finally, the individual qualifications that are required in more problem-driven research

systems are to some extent different from those that seem functional to old models of

knowledge production. Ability to work in transdisciplinary teams is much more valuable, a point

that is more carefully examined in the next sub-section. More generally, training of social

24 Gibbons et al. (1994) argue that, to some extent, the new mode of organization of knowledge production

is a consequence of greater financial pressures on universities, and a change in the sources of funding for

research.


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scientists and policy analysts would need to strengthen skills that facilitate “traveling” between

problem areas and collaboration with multiple stake-holders and specialists. This does not, as

noted by Gibbons and collaborators, eliminate the need for discipline-based training, but points

to necessary complements to the traditional models of disciplinary education in developingcountries (e.g., temporary professional study-practice appointments with policy agencies or

social/political organizations; internships in problem-oriented research institutes; interdisciplinary

review committees for applied theses and dissertations; etc.).

2. Implications for external partners

The new conventional wisdom on PESKS for development seems more firmly

established, and with possibly farther reaching consequences, among international development

players. The new perspective emanating from the three literatures has significant implications for

international development practice geared at supporting the generation of indigenous knowledge

for development, sometimes in stark contrast with the prescriptions of the conventional wisdom

(see Table 2). This said, the proposed alternative and the predominant consensus agree on a

first initial point: external partners can make a significant contribution to establishing pro-

development knowledge systems in developing countries, and in some cases and for some

purposes external interventions may be the only solution to excessively tight resource

constraints, market failures and coordination problems.25

As suggested by the brief review of GDN’s activities, international organizations

oftentimes tend to support research for development through mechanisms that allow its

questions and approaches to be driven by the global advances in some relevant discipline or in

development thinking more broadly. The three literatures examined suggest, instead, that greater

attention should be paid to the perception of development bottlenecks in the political systems of

25 For example, there may not be a sufficiently articulate “demand” for policy analyses in very poor

developing countries, in part because there is no tradition of their sustained production and use. Therefore,

in the absence of an initial push, those countries may be caught in a vicious circle preventing the

constructive utilization of creativity and information that is otherwise available (Joekes and Medhora, 2001).


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the developing countries themselves. This could imply paying greater attention and giving greater

recognition to the process by which research questions originate in developing countries, as a

criterion of their “relevance”, rather than relying on established professional understanding of the

true roots or key challenges of development. In response to this, and the associated challenge ofencouraging problem-oriented research, some funding agencies (IDRC, 2000) have been

experimenting with problem-oriented programs, as opposed to generic or disciplinary research

funding mechanisms.26 This appears as a promising avenue to pursue, although it does not fully

take care of the issue of how to organize and manage global or regional support strategies that

remain responsive to individual countries’ specific innovation trajectories and their associated,

possibly widely heterogeneous, evolving knowledge priorities.

26 IDRC’s programs focus on problem areas such as “peace building and reconstruction”, “governance,

equity and health”, or “microeconomic impacts of macroeconomic and adjustment policies”.


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Table 2

Implications for international and other external partners:Conventional wisdom vs. alternative approach

Area of intervention Conventional wisdom/practice Alternative approach

Research agendas and researchapproaches

Driven by discip

the knowledge systems implications of institutions for high quality growth

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