What We're Reading, Part One
David Jacobstein
Hello all!
It’s been another 3 months and as we gear up to celebrate a major anniversary in the US, there’s a lot that’s front of mind around growth and evolution of democracy, and whether we can sustain American democracy for another 250 years. It's also a sad day as today is one year since the dismantling of USAID; I hope my readers from that orbit are all hanging in there today.
There’s also some fantastic World Cup soccer being played and heartwarming stories of people connecting, regardless of their leaders, to offer hospitality, share traditions, and learn.
If you’re looking for something to do while waiting in a park for sunset and fireworks, or if you’re busy fretting about how we can get international cooperation and democratic progress onto a steadier path, here’s some useful food for thought.
Starting this quarter with systems thinking, a few really standout pieces were published:
I’m late discovering it, but can’t rave enough about this SILP model on learning and in-between spaces. It’s brilliant because it takes what is often teleological advice to leave behind linear thinking and apply systems thinking into a more realistic, and more complicated, set of polarities where there are always tradeoffs amidst choices. It articulates the idea of holding difference as core task rather than resolving issues, which resonates so much with my experience in balancing adaptation to the new and coherence over time as a core challenge for any organization or system.
It’s hard to categorize, as it is a synthesis of systems thinking, democratic governance, and AI, but this Farrell article really helps to articulate the limitations of AI as a tool in ways that strongly echo the debates over RCTs in development. It’s also catnip for me, referencing both Nguyen’s The Score and Scott’s Seeing Like a State. As he writes, AI systematically outperforms human expertise in certain instances - it “is better when there are clearly defined outcomes, good data, and clear reference cases that can be used for comparison.” This lends itself to an engineering worldview that presumes we can optimize every question, and that the issues have been ones of data availability or analytical power. However, “ political disagreement generally resists optimization. When you have incommensurable tradeoffs (even very simple ones: should you use money in your budget to pay for a playground to make parents happy or a fire station to make it less likely that businesses will burn down), you have moved decisively away from the kinds of problems that machine learning, or optimization more generally, can simplify in useful ways.” This has deep implications for where and how we deploy AI - if it is intended to improve service delivery at scale by optimizing use of public resources, it will fail, because it is not an optimization problem. Using it to aggregate considerations and surface tensions to enable collective consideration of more visible problems, on the other hand, could be very powerful in leveling playing fields across time and expertise, but embeds AI in larger spaces and questions of discussion and decision-making that proponents need to consider for design and use. This is the application of systems thinking to problems in a clear and meaningful way.
A related point is made in a different space here to introduce functions that matter for connecting proximity and local knowledge to systems change. The consideration of the specific functions that enable knowledge to matter over time and space to the shaping of systems is important for anyone hoping to catalyze, support, evaluate, or otherwise engage with those functions. Much as treating AI as a black box will obscure its utility in governance, treating local knowledge and influence as an inherent quality will obscure how that knowledge can better influence wider systems change.
I haven’t finished reading it, but (hat tip to Rachel Leeds for pointing it out) this journal on democracy and governance and systems is a real gold mine. I particularly liked the rich first person recounting in the gardening alongside landscaping article, where interviews with particular actors driving a systemic understanding into a narrower technocratic approach explain their experiences in trying to do so, where they take heart and strength, and why makes it difficult.
A simple and helpful paper on learning questions and their role in shaping philanthropic practice seems to me to be a great entry point to embed systems thinking where it still feels exotic.
A new SSIR article on relational intelligence seems to me to start to capture elements of the above as well, albeit as an individual quality rather than one between people or groups. The explanation of what relational intelligence is offers a provocative counterpoint for work on individual leadership or skills to the typical approaches in training and formation.
A useful set of tools for leveraging relational mechanisms to enable pivots (by funders and partners), with a great graphic as part of Flor’s introduction.
Finally, trying something quite different - not related to the development or political economy space, I’ve been a longtime listener to the Volts podcast on emerging clean energy approaches. But I wanted to highlight this particular Volts podcast on networks and podcasts, both for its general content and for the way the initial section around how network structures relates to systems outcomes as well as the political economy later of a consumer supporting reform not having venture capital backers. A great illustration of how systems take shape and how background factors influence path dependency in ways not always understood or foreseen.
David Jacobstein
Hi all,
Here's the second section, on political economy and development. In the Political Economy space this quarter, there were some important efforts to reimagine the development space in ways better aligned with incentives and processes of change, as well as some more tangible applied PEA products.
Without further ado:
In terms of pushing the imagination of what is possible and what might happen, few have done more to illustrate new ideas than Jenny Hodgson. Her new article on Possible Now (a theme I’ve written about regularly) is both a distillation of the idea and an invitation to co-create it together. I highly recommend you take a look and, where it fits, chime in!
I’ve been waiting a while for this one! The Open PEA site is now up and public, with blogs emerging. The idea that producing or sharing political economy knowledge in more public spaces can contribute as a type of public good towards development outcomes is an interesting and almost provocative stance, and one that I think shows some real promise in a more multipolar and less coordinated world. I particularly wanted to flag their cool new Open PEA article on education PPPs and distinguishing between them and their effects. I’ve long been convinced by the critique of “best buys” by Aston and I find this offers a much clearer approach for determining whether a PPP is worthwhile and contributes to outcomes over time, as they write “because the real question is not simply whether a PPP improves learning outcomes in the short term, but whether it strengthens the state’s ability to sustain those gains over time.” This helps reframe the question of whether a program works from a replicable pilot towards an investment in a state that can achieve results at scale, a shift that is necessary (but not always happening) across all sectors.
A fantastic review synthesizing three books, h/t Jeffrey Paller’s amazing weekly list of articles, on identity, city built environment, and politics. The questions of political economy are deeply embedded, but essentially the focus on urban areas as central to both the physical and symbolic construction and contestation of the nation outline an agenda of development while expressing considerations that determine both how cities are built and how that building interacts with larger state development efforts. I think this is an incredibly relevant and underexplored topic.
I am so grateful that research like this captured around what’s next for Nepal’s former USAID ecosystem is being conducted. A really great review, if difficult to face the damage done. It highlights the resilience of many partners and the new paths forwards that they are pursuing. The section on what worked in USAID funding, particular scale, multiyear funding, and convening power, is a reminder of how much an effective donor can amplify good work, and as much as many of us are longstanding critics looking to improve this programming, it’s also confirmation of the high baseline level of quality that was being provided. Kudos to Accountability Lab Nepal for organizing it.
A similar review, at wider scale, of the damage to the international media from USAID’s dismantling, perhaps starker in its review of the situation.
Pritchett on economic growth versus small-scale interventions is very helpful in both situating the smoothing/sustaining functions of small-scale interventions and in relating specific work to larger transformation efforts. I see this as part of a wider effort (see the education policy paper PPP article above as another example) to fully appreciate what it means for external support and intervention to fit a small way into larger developmental processes, taking seriously the factors that allow change at scale to happen.
I’m fascinated by this World Bank reform ideas paper with clear articulation of old model assumptions needing to be updated. I have to highlight their quote “The key insight is that missions do not target growth directly; they generate it through problem-oriented investment and innovation. Growth, jobs, and inclusion are outcomes that emerge from mission-oriented processes, not targets that can be pursued in isolation. This distinction is consequential for how policy is organised. Missions operate through portfolios of investments, which serve as units of delivery rather than units of design. When growth itself becomes the objective, or when policy is organised around individual projects rather than mission portfolios, investment fragments and systemic impact is lost.” While we’ve known of Goodhart’s Law for a while, it’s incredibly valuable to relate processes that generate growth as distinct actions from growth, and focus on the right questions of what should be done rather than what the impact of the doing should be.
I love this paper that the Policy Practice prepared for FCDO on stakeholder mapping, and more generally how supplemental tools can incorporate PEA lens. Building these considerations into normal ways of considering the world and the options for change is an essential task for everyone who believes in TWP.
A blog post on leadership as relational, with a nice summary of how relational leadership is generated and expressed in the Pacific region.
I’m of two minds about this article from Duncan Green on stories versus evidence. On the one hand, I completely agree that there is a vital role of stories in framing and shaping how evidence is understood and interpreted, and it makes good points about these functions. On the other hand, I’m dubious of the idea that numbers offer more credible or objective evidence, and even the framing of this dichotomy implicitly reinforces a hierarchy that guides people to discount qualitative truths as less valid or compelling.
This article from Craig Grunwald article on multitrack partnerships offers a nice summary of how understanding the incentive space and working with the grain of the political economy is essential to marshaling evidence that matters.
Brendan Halloran’s two articles on facilitating wider country ownership through platforms in countries is a promising lead for where energy for coordination and ownership can be found, and connects well with these questions of understanding and engaging with the political economy of the space. A really strong applied example of both why this hasn’t happened as much in climate as a space, and avenues through which it could.
Alan Hudson’s takeaways on systemic impact investing contain a rich discussion of how blended finance focuses on the possibility to exit, and whether closer examination of context for impact investing could point towards how to influence next category of capital in addition to directly identify useful returns. This aligns with Jess Dagger’s work on systemic investment, with Alan’s updated discussion around regulatory landscaping, and also with Peter Evans’ efforts on collaborative political economy. This illustrates overall what it really means to envision locally-led development: the space for shared sensemaking is the driver of change by the local actors themselves.
One I haven’t gotten to yet, but wanted to flag - an IDS paper on Theories of Change and their potential uses.
Another in the queue is a new Nick Cheeseman article on authoritarian middle powers and international order, and the role that middle powers of less democratic bent might be playing in a changed world.
Alan Hudson
If you are interested in more reflections from the TransCap Systemic Investing Summit, from April, in Rio, I've collated and summarised all I could find, here.
On the same theme, my late 2025 review of Jess Daggers' work on Systemic Investing Measurement and Management (aka MEL, ish), with links to her 5 pieces from May 2025, is here. And Jess's latest piece on System Intelligence - the direction in which TransCap's thinking and practice on SIMM/MEL is going - is here.
Wishing friends and colleagues in the US a determined and hopeful July 4th (perhaps even for the World Cup?!) with families and friends.
best wishes,
alan
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