LAD Training Programs

This training program addresses the challenges faced by public sector leaders as they foster economic growth through infrastructure development in politically charged environments. It uses case studies on how public sector policies and procurement practices for infrastructure can help the private sector be a constructive force for economic growth and development.

A driving principle of the LAD infrastructure module is that infrastructure project shaping and coalition building are not like engineering or other technical fields that have discrete skills and clear, optimal solutions. Instead, successful managers must be politically aware and weigh a broad range of factors that influence project outcomes. They must have a solid grasp of country-specific economic, financial, political, and cultural realities. Most importantly, they must have a sense of how to set priorities, sequence actions, and build coalitions.

This course provides participants with an analytical framework to build these leadership abilities and operate effectively under adverse conditions. Major themes are:

• Providing public goods
• Bypassing bureaucratic obstacles
• Facilitating private investment
• Strengthening the state as an economic catalyst

Rather than a single “template” or “roadmap” for infrastructure, the discussion of each challenge is organized around a “checklist” of frequent barriers, a set of warning signs that a particular barrier may be a serious impediment to a proposed infrastructure initiative, and a set of strategic options for trying to overcome those barriers. The importance of local and policy sector context in “diagnosing” specific infrastructure challenges and in choosing strategies to address them is emphasized throughout the course.

The format of the course includes three major components:

1. A morning lecture sets out a major theme for the day — one of the five challenges — and introduces a set of analytical tools that can be used to anticipate impediments to infrastructure and strategic options for overcoming them.
    
2. The second component of the course is the analysis of particular cases of public policy and infrastructure. Some of these cases are from the Leadership Academy for Development’s own case study library. Others come from the Harvard Kennedy School and other sources. Still others are developed by LAD’s partner institutions in the course of our partnership with them. Other “curated” cases are developed from a mixture of primary and secondary materials about a particular, often currently unresolved, policy debate. Case discussions are designed to be highly interactive, with the instructor guiding the discussion. Still, the course participants take the lead in developing the case analysis, linking it to analytical categories developed in the lecture, and proposing and weighing the merits of various policy alternatives. Participants are often called upon to play the roles of the case protagonist, various case stakeholders, or advisors to the case protagonist. Most of the cases are open-ended: the outcome of the case is not revealed so that participants’ discussions are not swayed by thinking that the actual outcomes were either “correct” or inevitable.
    
3. The third component of the course is group projects that address infrastructure issues that are currently confronting governments in the region where it is being held. Ideas for group projects are generated and decided by the class participants themselves. Governments are encouraged to send groups of individuals to the course who can “brainstorm” reform options and strategies that are currently on their agendas. After deciding on a project topic, each group spends part of the day working on that topic and applying that day’s material to refine their proposal and strategy. Each group presents their proposal on the final day of the course.

Intended Learning Outcomes

After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:

• Understand major challenges to public policy for infrastructure
• Anticipate and diagnose barriers that are likely to arise for specific alternatives
• Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies for addressing infrastructure challenges

Course Duration: Generally five days

Course Faculty: Francis Fukuyama, Roger Leeds, Michael Bennon

Countries where this course has been offered:  Ethiopia, Japan, Kenya, MENA (Middle East North Africa for women), North Macedonia, United States

Government efforts at policy reform in the developing world have often come up short. Some initiatives have been announced with great fanfare but failed to make it through complex and sometimes opaque policymaking processes. Other reform initiatives have developed problems during policy implementation, such as exceeding planned budgets, falling behind overly ambitious schedules, developing coordination issues between government agencies or different levels of government, or facing resistance from the “frontline workers” who are actually delivering the program. Other reform initiatives have fallen victim to rent-seeking by politicians or bureaucrats. Still, other policy innovations have had promising results in early “pilots” that were not duplicated when they were rolled out on a wider basis.

This course examines why policy reform initiatives often have disappointing results and tries to give policymakers and policy implementers tools that can be useful in anticipating, addressing, and overcoming challenges that they are likely to encounter in trying to bring about policy reforms.

The course is organized around a common set of five challenges that policymakers encounter in most policy reform initiatives:

• Building coalitions of support among stakeholders implementing policy reform
• Changing the behavior of target populations (businesses, individuals, and/or frontline workers)
• Building state capacity
• Scaling up and avoiding mission drift in reforms

Rather than a single “template” or “roadmap” for policy reform, the discussion of each challenge is organized around a “checklist” of frequent barriers to reform, a set of warning signs that a particular barrier may be a serious impediment to a proposed reform initiative, and a set of strategic options for trying to overcome those barriers. The importance of local and policy sector context in “diagnosing” specific reform challenges and choosing strategies to address them is emphasized throughout the course.

The format of the course includes three major components:

1. A morning lecture sets out a major theme for the day — one of the five challenges — and introduces a set of analytical tools that can be used to anticipate impediments to reform and strategic options for overcoming them.
    
2. The second component of the course is the analysis of particular cases of policy reform. Some of these cases are from the Leadership Academy for Development’s own case study library. Others come from the Harvard Kennedy School and other sources. Still others are developed by LAD’s partner institutions in the course of our partnership with them. Other “curated” cases are developed from a mixture of primary and secondary materials about a particular, often currently unresolved, policy debate. Case discussions are designed to be highly interactive, with the instructor guiding the discussion. Still, the course participants take the lead in developing the case analysis, linking it to analytical categories developed in the lecture, and proposing and weighing the merits of various policy alternatives. Participants are often called upon to play the roles of the case protagonist, various case stakeholders, or advisors to the case protagonist. Most of the cases are open-ended: the outcome of the case is not revealed so that participants’ discussions are not swayed by thinking that the actual outcomes were either “correct” or inevitable.
    
3. The third component of the course is group projects that address policy issues that are currently confronting governments in the region where it is being held. Ideas for group projects are generated and decided by the class participants themselves. Governments are encouraged to send groups of individuals to the course who can “brainstorm” reform options and strategies that are currently on their agendas. After deciding on a project topic, each group spends part of the day working on that topic and applying that day’s material to refine their proposal and strategy. Each group presents their proposal on the final day of the course.

Intended Learning Outcomes

After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:

• Understand major challenges to policy reform
• Anticipate and diagnose barriers that are likely to arise for specific reform alternatives
• Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies for addressing reform challenges

Course Duration: Generally five days.

Course Faculty: Francis Fukuyama, Kent Weaver, Jen Tobin

Countries where this course has been offered: Georgia, India, Montenegro, Tunisia, Ukraine, United States (World Bank headquarters)

Why do parents in many developing countries sometimes fail to send their children to school, even when there is no charge for school attendance? Why do people continue to begin to smoke, even in countries where there are well-organized anti-smoking programs, including ghastly pictures on cigarette packages prominently displaying the ill effects of smoking? Why do parents sometimes resist immunization and other public health campaigns? Why is corruption a bigger problem in Indonesia than in Singapore? Why are violations of labor and environmental standards much higher in some countries than others? Why is the informal sector of the economy so large in many developing countries? Why are gender ratios at birth highly skewed in some Asian societies but not in others? Why do commercial sex workers and their clients frequently fail to use condoms, even though the risks of unprotected sex are so high?

What all of these questions have in common is that they concern why citizens and businesses fail to comply with requests or demands made (though frequently not enforced) by governments for specific behaviors and/or act in ways that seem contrary to their self-interest. This workshop course draws upon insights from social psychology, behavioral economics, law, political science, and anthropology to understand barriers to behavior change. We also investigate strategies that policy designers and implementers can use to change behavior and increase compliance. These include social marketing campaigns, incentive approaches, choice architecture, efforts to address resource barriers to compliance, and stepped-up monitoring and enforcement. Political constraints on the choice of strategies are also addressed. The course relies heavily on case materials to address compliance problems in a variety of policy sectors and countries, with cases tailored to the country and region where it is taking place.

The course can be tailored to include group projects that address current behavior management issues confronting governments in specific countries. Governments are encouraged to send diverse teams of staff to work on developing strategic responses to specific behavioral problems facing particular government agencies.  

Intended Learning Outcomes  

• After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:
• Understand major barriers to compliance with government policy and behavior change.
• Develop and implement a research strategy to investigate barriers to compliance, including quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method strategies.
• Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies to address compliance problems      

Topics for individual Sessions May Include:

• Prospect Theory, Behavioral Economics, and Cognitive and Informational Barriers to Compliance
• Choice Architecture Strategies for Behavior Change
• Incentivizing, Monitoring, Enforcing, and Measuring Compliance
• Framing & Social Marketing
• Beliefs, Norms, and Peer Effects
• Resources and Target Autonomy as Barriers to Compliance
• Changing the Behavior of Business
• Integrating Multiple Strategies to Improve Compliance 
  Strategies for Obtaining Complex and Ongoing Compliance
• Targeting Program Interventions and Using Secondary Targets
• Piloting and Evaluating Behavioral Interventions
• A Behavioral Approach to Combatting Corruption
• The Politics of Compliance and Enforcement Regimes
• Sustaining and Scaling Up Behavioral Interventions  

Course Duration: Two to five days, depending on the depth and breadth clients seek and whether group projects are included.  

Course Faculty: Kent Weaver, Anat Gofen

Countries where this course has been offered: Australia, Brunei, France, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Lithuania, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United States

This workshop course is designed to develop skills that faculty in policy-focused universities and training institutions can use both to develop interactive and participant-centered teaching styles and to help faculty develop skills in case writing. It can be offered in multiple formats, with differing degrees of emphasis on case teaching and case writing.

In multi-day formats that include both case teaching and case writing, the first two days mainly involve "how to" lessons on both teaching and writing, interspersed with activities where the participants work in teams to do things like prepare case teaching plans and class openings that they present to all of the participants. The initial emphasis is on case teaching since before participants can write a successful case, they must understand how learning in a case-oriented classroom takes place. The workshop includes case discussions on several existing cases, combined with a “post-mortem” of what worked and what did not in both the written case and the case discussion. We discuss core teaching strategies, including the development of time management plans, whiteboard management plans, how to pose opening questions, “cold-calling” versus “warm calling,” and how to close a case discussion class with “Take-Aways.”

In discussing case writing, the course addresses issues such as how to decide on a case theme and learning objectives, what material should be included and left out (or relegated to appendices), and how to build participant engagement into the way a case is written. Later workshop sessions will include topics such as how to write multi-player simulation exercises that have students play roles of participants in the policy situation.

Beginning on the first day of multi-day case writing workshops, participants spend some time working on cases of their own choosing, and it is expected that many of the participants will come to the workshop with very rough drafts of potential cases. By the middle of Day 3, the emphasis shifts more to the cases that they are working on preparing themselves. On the final day, participants will have an opportunity to present preliminary versions of their cases and get feedback from the entire group.

Topics for Individual Sessions:

• Introduction to Case Teaching and Participant-Centered Learning
• Leading a Participant-Oriented Discussion 1: Opening and closing class sessions, whiteboard, and time management plans
• Leading a Participant-Oriented Discussion 2: Encouraging classroom participation with class votes, stakeholder matrices, and other techniques
• Using Simulations and Role-Plays in Case Discussions
• Using Alternative Materials (e.g., journal articles, newspaper articles, and primary documents) in Case Teaching
• Multi-Case Discussions in the Classroom
• Managing Diversity in Participants
• Group Activity: Preparing a Case Discussion
• Introduction to Case Writing: Case Structure and Style
• Refining Case Writing Skills: Preparing a Teaching Note

Course Duration: One or two days (case teaching only) to five days (case writing and case teaching). When case writing is included, participants are expected to come to the course with case ideas and outlines. The last two days of the course are spent primarily working on and refining case plans and presenting draft cases. The workshop can also be done in a split format, with three days of introductory sessions followed by a break of a month or more, concluding with another two-day session in which participants present more polished versions of cases that they have written.

Course Faculty: Mary Hilderbrand, Kent Weaver, Blair Cameron

Countries where this course has been offered: Brazil, Georgia, India, Japan, Singapore, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States