Hirschmanian Themes of Social Learning and Change

Ellerman, David

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACHIEVEMENT;    ACTIVE LEARNING;    ADAPTATION;    ADJUSTMENT;    ATTENTION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2591
RP-ID  :  WPS2591

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Many development strategies assume (ordesperately hope) that a country already has the capacity toplan and implement institutional reform or that suchinstitutional reform can be pushed through with the externalpressures of aid and conditionalities. In a decentralizedreform strategy, developmental change is induced not bygovernment fiat but by releasing and channeling localenergies in smaller projects that will in due course spreadthrough links, learning, imitation, and benchmarking. A"Christmas tree" of conditionalities hung on anadjustment loan is generally ineffective in getting acountry to develop "ownership" of reform or ingenerating sustainable change. Development agencies need towork toward client governments genuine commitment to policyreform rather than believe that they can "buy"such commitment with aid money. But how does a country getfrom here to there? Here is where the Hirschmanian notion ofunbalanced growth can be "rediscovered." A countrythat has already developed a "good policyenvironment" 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. Whenthe central government lacks such a capability, theHirschmanian approach is to look for "hiddenrationalities" in small areas or on the periphery andthen help the small beginnings to spread--using, wherepossible, the natural pressures of linkages. Rather than tryto put all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together at once tomake it look like the picture on the box, one starts in thesmall areas where the pieces are starting to fit togetherand builds outward, using the links between the pieces. theauthor shows several authors arriving at a similar strategyfrom different starting points. Similar ideas underlie theJapanese system of just-in-time production based oninventory, local problemsolving, benchmarking, andcontinuous improvement: Charles Lindblom's theory ofincrementalism and muddling through; Donald Schon andEverett Rogers's treatment of decentralized sociallearning; and Charles Sabel's theory of learning by monitoring.