New Journal Article: By Design or by Default

The last decades of alchemistic toying with various concepts of and approaches to “state building” failed to deliver any golden formula. Capacity development in state institutions remains the weak link, if not the key conundrum, in international state and peace building. This essay offers an analytical narrative that is intended to provoke thinking about the design of capacity development programmes. Based on extensive fieldwork, the authors point out how some of the most significant successes of a particular capacity development program have developed out of freedom, voluntarism and decentralised initiatives rather than through detailed topdown design and implementation.

From a policy perspective, this distinction between design and default points to a core dilemma of international interventions: the contrast between generic approaches and the unruly heterogeneity of social and human life. If the best options for some parts of capacity development programming are ‘default’ processes in the context of little pre-planning, the question is whether defaults can be designed and, if they can, what the policy implications are in the context of international cooperation. From a historical perspective, default- and demand-driven development fits much better with the evolution of the family of developed states.