Description:

Life for most people in most developing countries has never been better. This should be rightly celebrated, but improving basic levels of human welfare from a low base was the easy part.

To consolidate and expand these achievements, the key development challenge in the 21st century is building the state’s capability to implement incrementally more complex and contentious tasks (e.g., justice, regulation, taxation, land administration). These are fundamentally different types of challenges, however, ones for which our prevailing aid architecture was not designed. A new approach is required.

About the speaker: Michael Woolcock is the lead social development specialist in the World Bank's Development Research Group. He is also a part-time lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is a co-founder of Harvard's Building State Capability program and its signature operational initiative, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaption (PDIA). He is currently based in Malaysia with the World Bank, helping establish its first Knowledge and Research Hub—a non-lending office focused on generating and sharing global development knowledge.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Global Development Speaker Series.