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Speaker: Dan Honig, Assistant Professor of International Development, Johns Hopkins SAIS; PhD, Harvard Kennedy School
About the talk: Join the CID's Building State Capability Program and the M-RCBG's Sustainability Science Program for an interview with Dan Honig, author of Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn't Work. In his new book, Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, Honig concludes that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This “navigation by judgment” is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is hard to accurately measure.
About the speaker: Dan Honig is Assistant Professor of International Development and an affiliate of the International Political Economy program. Prof. Honig's research focuses on the relationship between organizational structure, management practice, and performance in developing country governments and organizations that provide foreign aid. His new book (Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Control of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work) examines the optimal level of autonomy in foreign aid intervention delivery and the role political authorizing environments and measurement regimes play in circumscribing that autonomy.
Prof. Honig has held a variety of positions outside of the academy. He was special assistant, then advisor, to successive Ministers of Finance (Liberia); ran a local nonprofit focused on helping post-conflict youth realize the power of their own ideas to better their lives and communities through agricultural entrepreneurship (East Timor); and has worked for a number of local and international NGOs (e.g. Ashoka in Thailand; Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development in Israel). A proud Detroiter, Prof. Honig holds an Honors BA from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School.
Sponsored by Matt Andrews, Bill Clark, and Jane Mansbridge.