Understanding the complex linkages that influence development effectiveness has often been hindered by a reliance on all-encompassing jargon and uninformative diagnostic measures. They provide little to no prescriptive value for identifying and addressing challenges. To improve the delivery of future projects, it is necessary to determine what went wrong with greater specificity.
The findings of a recent Policy Research Working Paper uses data from over 5,000 lending projects to assess the impact of delivery challenges on the success of World Bank projects. Drawing on insights from the lending projects, the paper's authors devised a set of standardized categories that aligned with the challenges practitioners faced in implementing projects. These categories were then disaggregated into specific challenges. The resulting taxonomy provided much-needed granularity to these concepts, offering a crosscutting instrument that reaches across country, time, and sector to diagnose issues across the project cycle. The taxonomy attempts to approximate the above contextual factors to identify common problems that are liable to impact all projects.
The authors hope their approach can be a first step towards a more systematic and rigorous understanding of how projects perform and why.
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