Brian Levy's blog

“The edge of chaos is the balance point where the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either…The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive...” - M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity.

I voted in South Africa’s founding democratic election in 1994, but it was via an absentee ballot cast in downtown D.C. Last month, when voters came out on May 18th to elect their local governments, it was the first time I had actually been in the country for an election. Turnout was high – upwards of 70% in some of the more hotly contested municipalities.

Education has long been a focal point of struggle in South Africa: the 1976 Soweto uprising, which set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the end of apartheid, was led by schoolchildren. In the 1980s, the contribution of youngsters to the liberation struggle took a starker turn: ‘No Education before Liberation’ became the watchword of many.

As coverage of the Arab Street’s awakening continues to dominate headlines, I find myself making further connections between the Middle Eastern, East Asian, and South African experiences. One intriguing common thread pertains to the role of the middle classes. 

I'm spending a few months based in South Africa – so it's been principally through the lens of that country's vibrant newspapers that I have been viewing the Arab spring, watching as a seemingly frozen authoritarian political order undergoes a thaw.

Moving away from ‘best practice’ thinking has profound implications for development policy work. The craft of policymaking is not simply about delineating the desirable: it is about finding entry points that are both feasible and value-adding. How is this to be done? After all, practitioners desire more guidance than the simple dictum that the answer is ‘country-specific’.

Taking governance seriously is profoundly discomfiting for development work. It forces each of us to examine critically and with humility what we bring to the development endeavor. The more we know about a country’s governance and political realities, the more we are confronted with the limitations – as well as continuing relevance – of our hard-won technical knowledge.

With remarkable rapidity, a commitment to ‘better understand and address the governance and corruption (GAC) impediments to development effectiveness’ as a basis for policy advising is taking hold among development practitioners. The implications for development work of bringing GAC to center stage are profound and unsettling – and only beginning to come into view. The momentum for GAC mainstreaming has two main drivers. The first comprises a recognition that the credibility of the aid endeavor depends on taking GAC seriously – as evidenced by the 2007 strategy paper, Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption, and similar initiatives by other donors.