Institutional constraints

In my assessment, the biggest set of problems were the constraints that were self imposed by the World Bank, the UN and its specialized agencies and all of the other ODA organizations that were doing the funding. And over the years, as development performance got worse and worse, the solutions were to go more and more into solving the problem by strengthening the framework of constraints. It was a feedback loop gone mad.

For some time in the late 1980s I did a number of supervision and evaluations assignments for the World Bank and UNDP. The Terms of Reference always called for identification of the 'constraints' or in French the 'goulots d'etranglements' and, of course, it was understood that the constraints would be ones that were 'acceptable' to institution that was hiring the consultant.