Something Old, Something New – Which Way to Go for Rule of Law Projects in the Agenda 2030 Era?

Africa and the developing world have been the theatre of countless rules of law assistance projects since the end of World War II, with mixed results. While the reasons for the mixed results vary from project to project and from country to country, this paper seeks to address the limitations that arise right from project inception, reviews the cycle of project management from problem construction to monitoring and evaluation, taking into account the core and secondary aspects of project management such as scope, budget, quality, schedule, as well as stakeholder engagement, communication, risk management and performance management. With a focus on the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, the paper addresses the following aspects: identify challenges of past approaches of major development partners and interrogate the current shift in paradigm by the World Bank, United Nations and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID). It will consider lessons from complexity and other methodologies, theories of change, theoretical frameworks, and the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) model as tools for doing development differently. The paper concludes with recommendations on improving the effectiveness of rule of law programmes, including a better approach to project design that makes allowance for results based programming, ease of adaptation, reflective learning through after action reviews and lessons learned from military science’s doctrines and practices in the management of complex operations. The paper also recommends, back and forth iteration and better stakeholder engagement, including at the lowest level of governance (local contextualization), to increase effectiveness of rule of law and change in mind-sets especially donor and development partner ideology.