Working with the Grain

Douglass North, Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, Washington University in St. Louis This is an important and original contribution to growth and development that suggests how to integrate complex parts of the development process. It is a major contribution.

If you want to understand how politics, institutions, and policy interact with each other to produce economic success or failure - not over the very long run when we are all dead, but in the shorter run that affects us all - there are few books that pack as much insight as this one. Brian Levy is a practitioner who can theorize as well as any scholar. But the real value added of this book is the practical and pragmatic approach it brings to institutional reform. Dani Rodrik, Albert Hirschman Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Brian Levy draws on a wealth of experience as a practitioner to provide us with a practical agenda for helping improve the governance of poor countries. His book will be required reading for everyone concerned with the institutional foundations of development. Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University

Ken Opalo, PhD Candidate, Stanford University I finally got to reading Brian Levy's Working With the Grain. It is easily the most underestimated development book of 2014, and should be read alongside William Easterly's Tyranny of Experts (which it both complements and pushes back against).

Merilee S. Grindle, Professor of International Development, Kennedy School of Government, and Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University Working with the Grain is about getting from the here to there of better governance in developing countries. Building on insights from recent scholarship and practice, this important book eschews recipes in a serious and thought-provoking analysis of how to approach reform initiatives in distinct contexts.

Brian Levy has a sustained track record of both thought leadership and hands-on experience. At the World Bank (where he worked for over two decades), he led the program to scale up support for public sector reform in Africa, and subsequently co-led the effort to mainstream governance and anti-corruption into the organization's operational programs. He has published widely on the interactions between institutions, political economy and development policy. He received his Ph.D in economics from Harvard University in 1983. He currently is on the faculties of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Cape Town.

Acknowledgements ; Prelude ; Part I: Concepts - a Dynamic Typology ; Chapter 1: The Search for a Useful Development Paradigm ; Chapter 2: Constructing a Typology ; Chapter 3: The Edge of Chaos ; Part II: Countries - the Typology in Action ; Chapter 4: The Dominant Trajectory in Action ; Chapter 5: Personalized Competition in Action ; Chapter 6: Virtuous Circles in Action ; Chapter 7: Patterns of Governance and Growth ; Part III: Addressing Governance Constraints ; Chapter 8: Function versus Form in Public Sector Reform ; Chapter 9: Transparency and Participation - Getting the Fit Right ; Chapter 10: Multi-Stakeholder Governance and the Private Sector ; Part IV: Development Strategies - The Governance Dimension ; Chapter 11: Governance and Development - Deconstructing the Discourse ; Chapter 12: Navigating the Development Knife-Edge ; Bibliography ; Index