Tournament Approaches to Policy Reform: Making Development Assistance More Effective

Acknowledgments

This work builds on several years of fruition and discussion with my colleagues , especially Stefano Giovannelli (UNIDO), Patrick Meagher (the IRIS Center) and Jonathan Alevy (University of Nevada, Reno). Chapters 3 through 5 benefited from research assistance as well as some preliminary drafting by Mauricio Palacios. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Wolfensohn Center for Development, funded by James Wolfensohn, and to thank Johannes Linn, the Center’s director, for his field-hardened feedback, willingness to pursue innovation, and continued enthusiasm, without which this book would have never seen the light of day. In leading the Wolfensohn Center’s search for replicable, scalable, and cost-effective project models to apply to its core areas, I am fortunate that the Center identified the interjurisdictional competition (IJC) concept as a reform and project delivery vehicle meriting consideration. It launched a policy research initiative that subjected the IJC concept to a review of its theory and practice. The review was then evaluated, critiqued, and fine-tuned by distinguished scholars and practitioners in series of workshops. This volume and its associated Brookings Policy Brief are the result. The hope is that the publication of this book will lead donors and other development actors to organize and rigorously test specific pilot applications. xix Acknowledgments 11601-00_FM-rev2.qxd 5/4/09 11:16 AM Page xix I would also like to express my gratitude for comments on previous versions of related work from Shaqk Afsah, Roy Bahl, Chas Cadwell, Bruno Frey, Avner Greif, Kai Kaiser, Stuti Khemani, Steve Knack, Peter Murrell, Doug North, Wally Oates, Sanjay Pradhan, Frank Sader, and Paul Smoke, as well as by seminar participants at the annual meeting of the International Society of New Institutional Economics (2004); the USAID Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade workshop on international development (2004); and “brown bag” meetings at the IRIS Center, Department of Economics at the University of Maryland (2005), the World Bank Public Sector Governance seminar (2007), the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy (2007), and the Urban Economics, Finance, and Management Thematic Group (World Bank) conference (2007), IncentiveBased Considerations for Designing Decentralized Infrastructure Programs. Thanks also go to Lael Brainard and other participants at Brookings Institution presentations (2006 and 2007). Written comments from an anonymous referee on the penultimate draft of this manuscript were especially invaluable. I also appreciate the useful factual information, materials, and feedback from those associated with some of the projects described in this report, including Talib Esmail, Scott Guggenheim, Milwida Guevara, José Larios, Bjorn Nordthueit, Ranjula Bali Swain, and Lynnette Wood. Finally, I would like to thank Starr Belsky for her superb editing and Azad Amir-Ghassemi for introducing me to Johannes Linn. All errors and omissions, however, are my own. xx acknowledgments 11601-00_FM-rev2.qxd 5/4/09 11:16 AM Page xx ...