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"It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak, and the public sector especially is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical phenomenon: effective public organizations in the midst of failure. While most literature is written from a focuses predominantly on state failure, corruption and other elements of bad governance, this book instead studies the phenomenon of Pockets of Effectiveness. In developing regions of the world there are public organisations and state-owned enterprises which provide public goods and services relatively effectively in a hostile environment dominated by bad governance. The authors provide the first systematic and comparative study of these exceptional organisations in five developing regions: Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East and the Caribbean and offer a political economy model for why and how Pockets of Effectiveness emerge, how they manage to persist and what their reform potential is. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, sociology, development, public administration and management."

"It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak, and the public sector especially is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical phenomenon: effective public organizations in the midst of failure.While most literature is written from a focuses predominantly on state failure, corruption and other elements of bad governance, this book instead studies the phenomenon of Pockets of Effectiveness. In developing regions of the world there are public organisations and state-owned enterprises which provide public goods and services relatively effectively in a hostile environment dominated by bad governance. The authors provide the first systematic and comparative study of these exceptional organisations in five developing regions: Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East and the Caribbean and offer a political economy model for why and how Pockets of Effectiveness emerge, how they manage to persist and what their reform potential is.This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, sociology, development, public administration and management"--

Development assistance often fails to achieve institutional change because of a limited consideration of the political nature of these reforms and the local context. In response, political and adaptive development assistance (PADA) approaches, such as "Thinking and Working Politically" (TWP) and "Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation" (PDIA), have been developed in recent years. Politicians, practitioners and researchers increasingly want to know if these approaches are more effective than mainstream approaches to development assistance. To answer this question, this paper develops a framework by asking three more specific questions about the "which", the "where" and the "what". First, for which types of development problems is political and adaptive development assistance likely to work better than mainstream approaches? Second, where or in which contexts might this be the case? And third, what contributions can be expected from these approaches including, but going beyond, effectiveness? Available evidence is used to answer these questions. This paper finds that political and adaptive approaches have comparative advantages over mainstream approaches when either the problem is complex, the context is hard to predict, or the solution is contentious. The overall conclusion is that development policy needs a broader variety of approaches from which to choose based on which fits the problem and the context best.

Development assistance often fails to achieve institutional change because of a limited consideration of the political nature of these reforms and the local context. In response, political and adaptive development assistance (PADA) approaches, such as 'Thinking and Working Politically' (TWP) and 'Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation' (PDIA), have been developed in recent years. Politicians, practitioners and researchers increasingly want to know if these approaches are more effective than mainstream approaches to development assistance. To answer this question, this paper develops a framework by asking three more specific questions about the 'which', the 'where' and the 'what'. First, for which types of development problems is political and adaptive development assistance likely to work betterthan mainstream approaches? Second, where or in which contexts might this be the case? And third, what contributions can be expected from these approaches including, but going beyond, effectiveness? Available evidence is used to answer these questions. This paper finds that political and adaptive approaches have comparative advantages over mainstreamapproaches when either the problem is complex, the context is hard to predict, or the solution is contentious. The overall conclusion is that development policy needs a broader variety of approaches from which to choose based on which fits the problem and the context best.

Ethnographic studies of the (local) state in Sri Lanka are rare. This article contributes to closing this gap by analysing the social organisation of politics and public administration from a lifeworld perspective of citizens, public servants and politicians, based on fieldwork in the south of Sri Lanka. Our findings reveal particular structural patterns of state-society relations that are based on the specific historical development of the Sri Lankan state. From the analysis of interactions and perceptions of the respective actors, codes and analytical concepts are developed for describing and better understanding the particular practices and meanings of politics in the country. The conclusion is that the omnipresence of politics and the autonomy that politicians have established in Sri Lanka are unlikely to lead to rights-based and democratic relations between 'state' and 'society' in the near future.

"This study examines how the PRSP approach and decentralisation efforts interact with each other by studying constraining factors in Malawi's Public Financial Management at central and local government level that impede the implementation of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy (MPRS). The
main focus is thus on implications of a decentralising PFM-system for PRSP implementation." (author's abstract)