Hirschmanian themes of social learning and change

Many development strategies assume (or desperately hope) that a country already has the capacity to plan and implement institutional reform or that such institutional reform can be pushed through with the external pressures of aid and conditionalities. In a decentralized reform strategy, developmental change is induced not by government fiat but by releasing and channeling local energies in smaller projects that will in due course spread through links, learning, imitation, and benchmarking. A"Christmas tree"of conditionalities hung on an adjustment loan is generally ineffective in getting a country to develop"ownership"of reform or in generating sustainable change. Development agencies need to work toward client governments genuine commitment to policy reform rather than believe that they can"buy"such commitment with aid money. But how does a country get from here to there? Here is where the Hirschmanian notion of unbalanced growth can be"rediscovered."A country that has already developed a"good policy environment"is like a country that can implement the"balanced growth plans"of the earlier debate. Such a country would be well on its way to development. When the central government lacks such a capability, the Hirschmanian approach is to look for"hidden rationalities"in small areas or on the periphery and then help the small beginnings to spread--using, where possible, the natural pressures of linkages. Rather than try to put all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together at once to make it look like the picture on the box, one starts in the small areas where the pieces are starting to fit together and builds outward, using the links between the pieces. the author shows several authors arriving at a similar strategy from different starting points. Similar ideas underlie the Japanese system of just-in-time production based on inventory, local problemsolving, benchmarking, and continuous improvement: Charles Lindblom's theory of incrementalism and muddling through; Donald Schon and Everett Rogers's treatment of decentralized social learning; and Charles Sabel's theory of learning by monitoring.