Eco-system as a constraint on outcomes-based policies

I have blogged earlier here about the under-appreciated difficulties with targeting outcomes. Apart from the three challenges raised in that post, there is another equally important challenge. This concerns ecosystem constraints.

It is commonly assumed that the existing ecosystem can be disciplined to achieve the desired outcomes through efficiency improvements, by getting human and physical capital to work more and better. What if this is not at all true?

This post gives three examples of how outputs or outcomes-focused technology or process interventions disrupted entrenched equilibriums and raised difficult administrative challenges. 

Consider school education. We have no clear idea of how much of learning outcomes realisation is a function of early childhood education, classroom instruction, remedial support in classroom, peer-engagement, off-school hours engagement at home, and the grade-appropriate competency levels themselves. What are their relative weights? How do those vary across socio-cultural contexts?  What if the competency standards are too ambitious? Or what if home engagement is critical?

Consider primary health care. This study found that doctors spend limited time and asked very few questions (as against what the medical protocol dictates) when treating patients. And it is pervasive across developing world, though nowhere as bad as in India. While unambiguously accepting the larger point about apathy and incompetence, it is also important to highlight the plumbing reality - the Out Patient load, when doctor is available, in PHCs can be far higher than what any systems can deal. Once this becomes the norm, a newly recruited doctor, over a few years, deeply internalise the challenge and forms a response that instead of treating the patient only tries to get done with the long-que of patients before lunch! Just imagine a GP in UK dealing with 30 patients turning up over a two-hour window with just one nurse for assistance. 

Nowhere is this more relevant than with state capacity. It is unrealistic to expect public systems as they exist now to deliver sectoral outcomes in scale and anywhere close to the defined benchmarks. Right now, these systems are entrapped in a low-level equilibrium of low human and physical resource allocations, unfavourable socio-economic conditions, and tolerance for and expectations of sub-par outcomes. Even the most incentive compatible financing strategy cannot be expected to have anything other than marginal effect on the system.  

Fundamentally, this should have been simple. Development is hard. The resolution of complex problems demand multi-dimensional policies that directly and proactively address deep structural failings, and persistent effort in their implementation. So to expect outcomes-targeting to magically deliver the result is plain naive.

But that we still fall prey to the lure of such apparently neat and simple solutions can be blamed on our psychological urges. We want to do something quickly about these complex problems. We find the logic of outcomes-based policies irresistible. So we seek refuge in them.

But they will not work!