 The title of this talk is or this discussion is the use of multiple adaptive networks as a crisis response. And this came out of our work in in so as ace, which is, we are tasked to look at feasible and effective anti corruption strategies in developing countries. And one of the things that we find in a lot of the attempts at improving governance in developing countries and to improve anti corruption is that a lot of these programs or approaches fail because we don't ask what are the incentives and the capabilities of insiders to engage in this peer group monitoring and to provide the information, not only the information on which enforcement can be based, but also have the capacity and the voice to engage in some of these enforcement themselves. In other words, unless information and enforcement are both at play, governance improvements don't happen. So this is a very fundamental observation of our whole approach to anti corruption. From that perspective, we find that a lot of conventional policy responses and delivery systems fail because of a broad governance problem which often has a corruption component to it. So sometimes these governance problems are simply that policymakers don't understand the nature of the problem they're trying to solve. But often the problem is that the policy is good in theory, but when you try to implement it, you find that the resources are captured by various players who take the resources and not don't deliver what is supposed to be delivered, or they don't deliver the expected levels of effort and initiative. And so it becomes a kind of you pump in resources but you don't get the outcomes you want. In each case, the problem is that for the governance to work, you need to have a feedback loop, which generates information about what's going wrong, but also creates incentives to act on it by actors who have the incentive and the capacity to act. And this is a really difficult problem. It sounds simple, but once you start thinking about it, you find that a lot of conventional ways of thinking about governance reform and anti corruption don't work in developing countries, because the characteristic feature of developing is that they have a weak rule of law, which means that as a system, the top down enforcement which you take for granted often in advanced countries where when you identify wrongdoing or you identify evidence which says something should happen. You can rely on enforcement mechanisms and systems which will enforce certain rules. This is absolutely not the case in developing countries to varying extents, ranging from very fragile countries and Jonathan will talk a little bit about that to even the kind of relatively fragile working developing countries that loop is very weak. So unless you also ask yourself, who is going to enforce this policy, or this use this information, then your attempts at governance or anti corruption, don't work. Here's the brief background. Now, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit us last year, we started looking at some of the health systems in our, the countries we work in. And the initial concern that we had was that given that these health systems were already stretched, were already very poorly organized internal governance structures were very weak. I mean, the fear was that they would have catastrophic failures. And the fear was that they would not be able to respond to this crisis at the scale and with the efficiency that was required. And indeed, in many cases, the outcomes were extremely poor. But the really interesting thing is that the outcomes in many other cases were not as poor as many of us feared. So there was a whole host of things that needed to be done from treatment initially, track and tracing, organizing information dissemination about social distancing, organizing lockdowns. And finally, organizing vaccinations. And what we find is that different developing countries had different levels of performance in these things, but they were not all equally bad in everything. So we started looking at what was working and why, and we found that the, the, there were some patterns in the bits of the system that were working better. So what were those patterns and this is what we want to share with you, because actually those patterns have some implications which go beyond the pandemic response and might help us to rethink how we think about systems organization for improved governance. In developing countries. So this research is at a very early stage. A lot of information is still has to be collected, but we wanted to share with you some approaches at this very initial phase. So we know that health systems are very centralized and for good reason health systems are centralized, because you want to have coordination between different parts of the health system. And a lot of these bits are interdependent and so in every country you find that the bulk of the health. I'm talking about developing countries is provided by very centralized public sector health delivery systems with the private sector and so on operating. This centralization is both necessary, but also has well known costs, and the costs are that particularly in context of poor rule of law and poor governance, the monitoring of flows from the top down into this vast, you know pyramid of activities which is the health system has always been very weak. And in most developing countries that has been organized with a lot of informal transactions, which you can call corruption and sometimes it's just not corruption but informality. A lot of problems are solved informally. So when you start pumping massive amounts of resources into this really fragile and informally organized badly controlled system, you are likely to get catastrophic outcomes. That big shock came with the coven 19 pandemic. And the interesting thing is that the response was not linear, a bad and fragile system did not completely collapse in every case. There were many counter movements which emerged spontaneously with innovative health sector individuals entrepreneurs NGOs concerned bureaucrats and politicians. They were popping up spontaneously because they had a strong incentives to find solutions. And, and here is where we find this pattern that what we find is that parallel to this centralized system. New players players were mobilized ranging from community organizations pharmaceutical companies, private hospitals and clinics, often with the payments organized by the public sector, but the initiatives happening in these private or NGO or social sectors. This did result in well known problems of coordination and corruption did spike, but that also had a positive effect and we are looking at the positive side of it now and then we need to think about how we design this reform going forward. The positive side was that by unleashing multiple pathways for delivering things or acquiring things like vaccinations or medicines. And I'm not talking about it uniformly but in those pockets that worked in the countries we looked at and we can give some examples in the q amp a later on if you are interested. We found that by allowing these multiple networks to mobilize a number of things happened. It generated information about what was working and to what extent. But it also created checks and balances between these parallels on systems, because there was a kind of friendly competition between them. And those that peer group monitoring that actually we can deliver this cheaper than the state or the state's public saying, actually, it turns out that we can do it better. That check and balance had a remarkable effect in not only generating information, but acting upon it and this is the really missing thing often in developing country governance, no one acts on the information because they don't have the incentive to act on the information. So just to run that up the model where it worked. And so it worked, for example, in Mumbai's big slum therapy. There was a very good effective response to track entries and monitoring. And it worked very well in Bangladesh's acquisition of vaccinations. And we can talk about a number of such examples, but there were a few conditions which made this work when it did work. The first condition was that you have to have more than one potential delivery agent with the capability to deliver so there has to be a minimum, you know, multiplicity of capabilities. So this is not the case in every context even within the same country so it only works where that condition is met. Secondly, there has to be some degree of coordination and feedback, so that there is a coordinating body which is looking at these multiple deliveries and saying actually this is not working and that is working. And that coordinating body must have the incentive to do that. Now in a pandemic, there's a very strong incentive to do that because a prime minister or different levels of the health authority are under pressure to deliver and so that coordination happens and this is a really strong learning that we have to identify the appropriate coordination where these different mechanisms can be assessed and then scaled up or scaled down. The third observation is that there was redundancy built in by definition, but this redundancy, that is you are trying different things at the same time, actually was less costly than the alternative. And to make it less costly than the alternative, obviously, the redundancy had to begin on a small scale. If you try to do the whole system on in multiple ways, obviously that would not work that kind of redundancy would cripple any physical system. So the redundancy worked because it started on a small scale, and then it was scaled up the bits that were scaled up or the ones that work. So those three conditions were essential in this adaptive flexible response system. And finally, I want to end with a couple of observations for handing over to Jonathan. The first observation is that the least cost and most effective delivery system is not defined by who can procure at the lowest price and who has the lowest unit costs in terms of salaries. The least cost and most effective delivery system as we all know depends fundamentally on the internal governance of that system. In other words, if the governance is good and you are managing your delivery properly, then that is the least cost system, most often, not that I am cutting my costs because I'm underpaying people or getting the cheapest contracts. There are examples of this with the EU versus UK contracting on vaccinations, we won't go there. The second observation is that the implicit competition between these multiple delivery systems was extremely beneficial in triggering socially desirable behavior. Now we often think of, you know, how to constrain public actors by removing or reducing their discretion because we are always worried that if they have discretion, they will do some bad things and often they do. But this is an example where by creating discretion but controlling it with this lateral competition, you actually generated a lot of pro society or pro social behavior. And this was really interesting to see even amongst players who are often very grasping and corrupt and so on. There was a competition to actually deliver and not everywhere I repeat in some pockets, but this is something we need to pick up and and develop in the future. And finally the final point is corruption did not go down by any means. There were many factors pushing corruption up during this pandemic, but the improvements of governance meant that the corruption was contained, and you had better outcomes in sectors where this multiple adaptive system could work. So here is the challenge that we are throwing out. We think that the elements that we have observed in the bits of the pandemic response that worked in developing countries actually show us a template for thinking in the future about how to reform these systems. And how should we should we reform the systems. There has been a debate in the past between in a period in the 1980s when we said the state doesn't work. Let's just have NGOs delivering things. And then we came back and said no, we need to have the state, but we need to fix the state with good governance. Neither of these approaches have been very effective because good governance could not convert these countries rapidly into rule of law countries, and obviously having a very effective and NGO driven system doesn't work. So what we are finding is that there is a different route forward, perhaps, which is to have coordination at the center of the public delivery system, and have multiple adaptive systems on a small scale that are experimenting and competing amongst themselves to show effectiveness, and then you scale that up, but you don't scale that up or scale it down permanently, it should be a continuous process of adaptation and experimentation. And I think this is the big learning from the pandemic. I'll stop here because I think others have really interesting things to add to this story. So thank you. Thank you very much, Moustak and Pallavi and Ace for inviting me to speak into this framework that I think is incredibly important at this time I think these learnings and the ability to formalize them as you're doing now is extremely important for health responses to pandemics but also other health crises. And, you know, I come at this as Moustak referred to as someone who works and has been working for 20 years in fragile places. You know, most of the Ace program itself the countries are on the OECD fragile context lists and so there's a lot of complementarity in terms of what you're focused on and what I see as, you know, really quite innovative in the work that you're doing. And I think from a top line perspective, the most important contribution that this framework makes is it provides a set of anti corruption solutions, but in a way that doesn't inhibit but in fact actually advances some of the other key operating imperatives that you need to respond. Namely, it promotes a resilient approach, an adoptive approach as Moustak mentioned, and also scaling approach. And so what I'd like to do is say three things about the anti corruption solutions that I see in this framework. And, and then three things about how these anti corruption solutions do promote adaptive management resilience and scalable solutions, so that this entire package becomes for me very, very elegant. And it kind of sets the bar really in terms of how other types of anti corruption work needs to proceed in the sense that you see a lot of interruption work, trying to limit and control and become very rigid, reduce discretion in performance. And it becomes at a great cost of them, you know, limiting experimentation of flexibility which is so important in emergency responses and longer term engagements and financial basis. So the three, the three anti corruption solutions that I see in this framework. I'll set them out and I think they build on some moustak points obviously. The first is this sort of weeding out framework and what I should say first is that what's fascinating for me is that a lot of all of these different contributions of the framework. They all hinge on this notion of redundant capacities, which talk referred to, right, having multiple different partners assigned at the outset to perform a similar set of tasks. And through that process, you get a lot of the first one is this anti corruption outcome about weeding out, which is allowing through the process of invitation it to become clear who the high performers are who are actually delivering on health outcomes, and who are the lower performers. And in terms of lower performers on one level. They're probably low performers because they have very limited capacities assets human resources. But there's another essence here of, they could also be low performance because they're not really in the business of high performance. They're actually coming to this with a sort of a rent seeking mindset. This framework to sort of pad contracts, finally get just etc. And this framework, this redundant capacities this competition as much not referred to it kind of weeds that out sort of disincentivizes them and also evaluates them. So that's the one piece. This is what I call sort of a disciplining measure or function here, which is to say that you probably have some really high performing or high capacity to partners, but who are doing corruption, who are opting for for operations in the health sector for private companies. And when they enter this framework, this horizontal network as as you've called it. They see pretty quickly that this is a competitive piece and that they need to move above board to actually deliver on these efficiencies and reduce effective outcomes. And so they're disciplined in this way. The question of caveat here of course is that how do you maintain high performing partners that have been predisposed to corruption in the past right, and this gets to some bush talks points about meeting that political pressure of the Prime Minister's office some kind of urgency from a political level to really sustain this kind of network, at least in the you know medium to short term. You also need these checks and balances and all the partners in the system being able to pay attention to what they're these other folks are doing. And you need some kind of community mechanisms as well to really monitor what's impact, what impact is being had on the ground. So there's a constellation here that you want to continually build into the framework. So I think it's very important to have this this sort of disciplining function in a way that sustains itself. The last piece is perhaps the most interesting for me, the last measure of inter corruption that this model introduces, which I call the enabling function. And I think one of the most important contributions of aces work more broadly in the introduction space is to recognize that there are firms and other kinds of implementing partners that would under other circumstances choose not to be doing corruption. They might be working in legitimate ways, but there are such barriers to markets or particular sectors like health that they really have to use corrupt measures to kind of pay their way into functionality or survivorship. So in the case of the health sector, you might have entities that are low performing, because they have to pay bribes in order to get permits and licenses to keep functioning. They have to pay bribes at the ports and the customs to get access to equipment and and other goods and supplies, and they have to then make ends meet by potentially extracting informal payments from users of the health system so that, you know, in the process of paying bribes, they've got to make the ends meet. And so, when these types of partners are allowed to enter the horizontal framework with its fast track mechanisms for bureaucratic permit licensing more streamlined approaches for procurement which we would imagine in the kind of a highly politically supported type of framework or network. They then become able or enabled to act with more effectiveness and efficiency. And there's also an element here where those lower capacity partners could be brought in and supported by higher performing partners in terms of capacity mentoring coaching in a way where they're also being able to function as backup capacities. And, and must have made a great point here, you couldn't sustain redundancy over a very long period of time because it could be very crippling or expensive for the system. So the competitive aspect about who's doing what, and who's, you know, the one that allows you to see the higher performers versus the lower performers over time will phase out because you identify the core group of partners that implement well. And so we want to have some of the redundancy which the paper your papers also mentioned as the backup capacities and these lower performers by helping enable them and strengthen them, and reduce their need for corruption, could be these fundamental backup capacities, right. And this is a contribution for those firms and incentive structure, but also why it is the capacity of the health sector itself, right. So we have a place like the BRC last year, where they simultaneously had to deal with covert 19 a cholera epidemic Ebola, and a national measles outbreak. There's so only so many high performers or relatively high performers in a system like that, you need these backup capacities. Overall, I think these are three really innovative ways to try to tackle corruption within the model or the framework that you proposed. And what I want to say now is just how I think this model enables as opposed to tracks from more adaptive resilient and scalable solutions as well. Because you can't have anti corruption measures again that undercut other key imperatives for a health response. And one, as I wish to alluded to as well, is this adaptive component. Right, so it's very hard to know at the, at the outset, what the right solution is in a place. You have a technical set of solutions that you know, you need to do contact tracing, for example, lockdowns, etc. But how you do that in very different political economic and social context is not apparent from the outset. So you need to have some kind of experimentation. The funding capacities allow you to do that. So in the process of being able to identify high and low performers, part of the criteria for evaluating higher performances. Can these groups with their own capacities adapt to the situation, can they find the right model in a way that's almost like a Rubik's cube. Can we take the technical approach and align it to the political, social and economic configuration that you need to actually make it work. So it promotes this adaptation. So of course, for many in the adaptive community, something that they often see as a kind of a strange bedfellow with intercorruption measures right, which really tried to have an x anti preconceived solution, and then create linearity and predictability so that they can control every step of the process. So what this model does is it provides a way to be adaptive to find out what's working and how to build that up or scale it, but also in a way that advances intercorruption. So that's very, very important. The other piece that contributes is on the resilience front. When you have backup redundant capacities, you build the resilience of the health system itself. And this is a still a very new way of thinking in the industry. Right. If you were to look back five years at health system strengthening and fragile states. There's a different approach that says, you know, let's look at each World Health Organization building block of the health system and try and strengthen those capacities for supply service delivery leadership and governance. But recently you've seen us aid and other major donors trying to advance a resilient health systems approach USA last year issued a grant of $250 million to create resilient health systems and fragile places, which is trying to find this sort of redundancy of how do you maintain system operations during crisis in a way that when your frontline health providers are compromised overwhelmed you have backup capacities. So this framework contributes to this new line of thinking, and in ways that bring intercorruption into it, which you don't often see in this approach right. In terms of intercorruption, there's been a few papers including from ace that notes that intercorruption isn't really talked about in the health sector in the way it is saying the economic sector. So this brings into focus a way in which you can do intercorruption in a way that promotes resilience as well. And as you know, a lot of you I'm particularly fond of the argument that bush talk articulated that sometimes we talk about resilience to talk about as creating excess capacity. So we get loggerheads with efficiency, but in fact, your arguments are that you need resilience in the system to promote efficiency, because it looks, there's an efficient solution that looks efficient until the wind blows it over. Right. So this is a very important contribution as well making the efficiency argument for resilience. And lastly, what this model does is it really promotes a new way of thinking about scaling as well. So there's a very antiquated notion of scaling right now in the eight industry that that sets up this notion that you have to do a pilot project, often a very small one somewhere. And if that works, then you scale it. And we're, you know, increasingly trying to move away from this and towards this idea of outcomes based scaling, the idea that you're promoting an outcome like health, like intercorruption like resilience. And you're allowing multiple scaling partners to work in this kind of scaling consortium or horizontal network, as you call it, in a way that allows you to see variation. What's working where who's working and where, and from their scale up was really working and scale down was not working. So we've seen a little bit of this in the health system. So there's that USA created this approach called the wave sequence and science approach, where you basically start doing primary health interventions at scale. So you have multiple partners spreading across a sub region or even a country, and they're all trying to implement a package of services. And through that process, you begin to see what's working and what's not, and you begin to learn and be sort of adaptive in the sense that this region is particularly good at creating this solution. Why aren't the others. And in this process, this wave sequence approach they actually rotate high performers to the low performers to coach them. So there's a bit of proof of concept here. You're on some of the examples that build on the examples that was not has from India and Bangladesh in places like Gaza and Afghanistan and Uganda that show, you know, a way in which high performers in your framework could support lower performers and build them into the system. But again with this intercorruption lens that doesn't exist quite yet in some of these other models. So that's very important as well. This provides again, I think a very elegant and an important solution. The hat trick of course is going to be as much talk referred to the ability to create coordination mechanisms that will bring the state in the Ministry of Health, and a series of solutions in ways that are very attentive to not only the scaling challenge and operationally building out and financing solutions, but look at the intercorruption elements, look at the adaptive iterative elements as well. And we've seen some examples of FCDO doing this kind of complex coordination work in Nepal, for example with economic transformation initiative there, or in the Pearl program in Nigeria, where they are looking at very politically savvy adaptive ways of doing complex work in economic development. We need to take that kind of same spear instead of precedent into this approach to say it can be done, it's being done in other sectors, and use it to have an entity that can deliver on scaling, but also ensure political and co-creation feedback mechanisms and the like. So this will be, I think, an important next phase in terms of how we build support for this. Thank you. Thank you Jonathan. And you know much talking Jonathan, you really set it up so well that I can, so that I can lead it into the next part of the discussion which is really exploring, you know, in a sense how can we bottle up these learnings from this framework on crisis response, you know, the broader learnings, the broader intuition of this framework of scaling, which is really about scaling for reveal competencies building resilience and in the process emerges an efficient relatively non corrupt outcome. And, you know, one of the sectors that the anti corruption evidence program in in so as has done a lot of work on is the electricity sector and it actually got us thinking it are there aspects, as I said, you know, within the broader intuition of the framework, are there aspects of which that can actually be transferable to the electricity sector and you know, obviously at first here, this jump to the electricity sector might might sound like a huge stress big stretch because you know there's the health sector here and there's the electricity sector here. There are some possible commonality could be see but there are some broad mechanisms which might might actually work and just to give a brief sort of headline of how the electricity sector works across many developing countries. The enforcement of rules in centralized electricity delivery systems is weak and can result in poor outcomes. In the electricity sector, the focus tends to be solely on procurement rules or it tends to be on let's just enforce the contracts never mind whether there is the capacity to enforce or the incentive indeed to stick to the rules. And obviously it doesn't work very well in the context where the rule of law is weak. And a well kept secret that the electricity sector in countries like Lebanon like Nigeria where is has done a lot of work or even Bangladesh is politically captured, but specifically in in the context of Lebanon and Nigeria. We also see that it's politically captured to the extent that any reform of the national grid within the short to medium term is actually not possible. And we're also looking at almost levels of crisis, certainly in Lebanon to a lesser extent but also through Nigeria or under supply to the extent that you know those countries productive capabilities are actually hugely constrained, because electricity supply is is is so sclerotic and electricity is so under supplied. What I'm suggesting is taking a step back and scaling down from the grid down to local networks now the recent literature on decentralization has suggested that decentralization might lead to, you know greater amounts of rent seeking and that's probably true in the sense in the case of administrative decentralization but but like with health, it might just be the opposite in the case of electricity generation and supply so downscaling to local networks using disaggregated decentralized mechanisms. There are times involving efficient but informal arrangements is possibly the way forward in the short term. The challenge is of course to see how these informal arrangements can be formalized and contextualized and scaled to be deployed in other settings but it's a way of thinking very differently of responding to an electricity supply challenge which can't have a more sort of immediate response like we do in health, but it's certainly, you know, on a more achievable scale than looking at the entire grid and understanding how to improve transmission then distribution and all the political nature of capital that takes place from from inch to end. Success here of course depends on a combination of a few factors, you know, we have to discover ways of attracting efficient investors to sustain competitive checks and balances the the whole system of competition to sustain checks and balances is as important to keep prices under control that's very important to keep rent seeking under control that's the whole competitive element, and in electricity it's very key that ensuring technologies are also environmentally the least damaging. And this is in context of weak rule of law. And when you're talking about the context of weak rule of law we're also meaning a high risk for investors. So essentially what we're talking about here is not the physical delivery mechanism that's not that's not the rapid scaling that we're talking about what we are talking about are different de risking strategies different contractual mechanisms across segments of users within a country that can be scaled as required in Nigeria we worked with small and medium enterprises and what used to be the beating heart of Nigerian manufacturing in the region in the southeast of Nigeria. And it actually turns out that there is what we call willingness to pay consumers who were once forced to be corrupt. Once they realize that there is a technological efficient mechanism which provides them electricity at an optimal tariff for them. They no longer want to be corrupt. This you know creates a virtuous cycle where wherein you get an investor who sees the willingness to pay as as so as proof for investing in that locality and these these investors tend to be more nimble more technologically capable because they're coming in with either solar and in the case of Nigeria because it's really more a gas economy than an oil economy. And CNG, not green as green as your your solar or wind based technologies but there is a lot of gas there is a lot of demand, the country really needs to speed up in terms of productivity and manufacturing growth. So, you know, CNG small 20 megawatt plants which are supplying to SME clusters actually becomes a very efficient way. There's a critical difference in that in the in the bar sector is it is too expensive to have too much redundancy, you know where isn't the supply of health services supplies hardly likely to outpace outpace demand, but of course there's some technical redundancy required in power systems to, but the appropriate analogy here is slightly different in sectors like power investments are lumpy and checks and balances have to be created by designing different delivery mechanisms that's that's what we are talking about different contract designs checks and balances need to be simultaneously attempted to identify effective designs that work in that particular local context. So you test. This is working in a particular cluster a particular cluster might need a different kind of a supplier a different kind of financing mechanism and what's very critical in countries like Lebanon and Nigeria. And this speaks to what what Jonathan was talking about the community aspect you know the community buying has to be very high we worked in in Zahle in Lebanon which has its own sort of sectarian complexities in Nigeria with the SMEs they have their own political economy complexities. Community buying is very important but once you get that community buying once you get that willingness to pay, you can actually get in less politically connected investors, and this by itself becomes a sort of anti corruption program not sort of becomes an anti corruption strategy, because when you're improving development outcomes, which is you are ensuring that more electric electricity supplied. Rent capture isn't taking place and people are able to improve productivity by definition by increasing efficiency you are reducing corruption so this becomes an effective anti corruption. This is not scale on the lines that must have talked about for the health sector, but we as he, you know said in the beginning these are early days, and we are doing so much interesting research we've been having conversations with with Jonathan and, and, you know, his team of colleagues, and there are very interesting ways in which we can join this thinking up, and we just thought that it would be interesting to present our work on the electricity sector, and how you can actually think about improving outcomes reducing corruption through this concept of scaling. It's not on the same scale of adaptive and, you know, sort of scalable as it is in the health sector but in the relative terms of how we think of the electricity sector this is certainly adaptive this is certainly very flexible. And we're hoping for some very interesting questions we're also hoping to continue this research and test it out in in Nigeria in Lebanon but I'm going to stop here because we started late. And maybe some of you might have a few questions so I'm happy to take any questions that you might have here. Let me just check the chat box we don't have any but we're happy to take questions. Go ahead. So thank you for the presentation it was is really interesting and yes very novel and so I really look forward to reading more so I'm, I'm, I work at the you for anti corruption resource center. I'm just wondering around this about this question of applicability and to where and when can we apply this framework. So Palavios has just mentioned about the possibilities of using it in the electricity sector but I'm just wondering more generally how to what extent it can be used for anti corruption or for better, less corrupt public service delivery. Once the emergency situation dissipates we move into some kind of new normal, because it seems to me that key to this framework are the incentives created by the situation, so the need to deliver so that's a very strong political incentive that you need to deliver and secondly also the incentive about who you deliver to because during the crisis, in a way the science decides who gets what, or who should get what, rather than the politics so in a way that the political contestation of public goods is voided by, by the science, and which is quite clear about who is in more need than others. And so I'm just wondering once you remove those two kind of bedrock incentive incentives to need to be efficient to get rid of, to get out of this situation as quickly as possible. And the clarity about who deserves what in this situation. Are you not then risking the possibility of these networks just turning into kind of formalized patron client networks. And then a kind of return to the situation where the state becomes even more contested and public service delivery, even more clientelistic. Much that would you like to take that first and then maybe we can go to Jonathan if he has anything to add. Yes, I think that's a really great point David I mean I think. So we are not. There's no panacea. I think that's the basic point. But I think what we are trying to highlight is that the conventional way of thinking about how to deal with clientelism and corruption has also utterly failed. And what we what we think that we can do which is to enforce rules on these different actors from above by having incrementally more rules based strategies, reducing discretion, trying to set up rules which can be then monitored from above and doesn't work precisely because anti corruption itself is corrupted. The very processes that you are trying to enforce become the subject of a further higher level round of corruption and the anti corruption commission becomes corrupt. The judges become corrupt the police become corrupt, because ultimately what is missing in this traditional way of thinking is that loop is not connected. The loop is at some point someone must have the interest in the in their own self interest to begin to enforce. And we always assume that there is this loop which is political will will connect it somehow so that ultimately, you know there's a prime minister or someone who in the, but the problem is a prime minister also is concerned with, you know, using short term benefits. And I think that isn't going to go away so we are we're talking about systems that are going to be structurally client list, and have structurally have weak rule of law in the foreseeable future which which means in the kind of policy cycle that we are thinking for 15 years. That's not going to change right so you will still have the top people doing lots of pretty bad things. And the problem is we don't have any mechanism for really constraining that so there's a difference between making a critique which we are all happy to make, and what can we do about it. And I and the answer there is that on those higher level things. The only effective answer is when society itself has many competing power centers and many competing interests, which then collectively check each other. And that is when you get a rule of law so if you ask, you know why is there a rule of law in the United States or the United Kingdom but not in Zimbabwe or Nigeria. So I think that there's absence of political will or there's absence of good rules and and so on. The society itself doesn't have built in checks and balances to actually create that loop in the end right now. So I think so that's a long term you know so we have to have a theory of change of how we get there, how we actually build up all those real checks and balances which are not institutional checks and balances, but organizational checks and balances and this is, this is a very important part of the work of Douglas North and Barry Weingast and, and others on limited access orders, where they say that you have to look at institutions and organizations together. And that's also what we say in our work on political settlements that institutions by themselves don't solve the problem, unless the organizations that is the agents want those institutions to work. So that's the background and the background isn't the kinds of questions you raised are actually unsolvable. We are saying can we make some incremental changes can we find some areas where the players themselves have a competitive interest in their own interest to do something which could be aligned with the public interest, and you're absolutely right. And that is not in general the case so we are looking for areas where that might be the case. Okay, and those areas might be not very many, but they're not so few either. And we do ourselves a lot of disservice by not going out and looking for those areas where actually you can mobilize the organizational checks and balances, which will make some of the institutions work. I think so that's the frame. So you said that. Sorry, sorry. So you said you know the Prime Minister is concerned about the health. Yes, the Prime Minister is concerned about health the Prime Minister is also concerned about lots of other areas of development Prime Ministers are hugely concerned about power supply. Governments have fallen and developing countries because power supplies have collapsed. The point is we are not giving them feasible instruments that can actually be aligned with their interest. They have an interest in creating jobs they just don't know how to do it and the way they do it usually doesn't create jobs, but don't they want to they want to. What what we are saying is that we need to help these developing countries with implementable ideas that can actually mobilize some of these internal checks and balances, and I agree with you it won't be in every sector and it won't work. Absolutely you won't get zero corruption. The point is to reduce this corruption in areas where it's feasible and get better development outcomes. So the bigger point that we're making is that maybe it's time to rethink the way we think about development. Right so development should not be think sort of as a kind of bureaucratic technocratic exercise that we go and say, look, this is the way you should be delivering health or doing skills programs or delivering power. And, and if you can't implement it is basically because you don't have good governance and we then tell you how to do the good governance, and then we'll say that post missing is a political wheel. A different way of thinking about it is that these are solutions which require a lot of innovation enterprise in those developing countries. How do we trigger that innovation. How do we coordinate that innovation by containing the corruption, but actually mobilizing some of these competitive activities, both between entrepreneurs and the state and we see this in the kind of vaccine response in Bangladesh there was a competition actually between the private sector and the state. We, this is not just a pandemic limited thing we want to trigger this post pandemic for job creation we want to see if you can do it for power generation. And we have to get away from this idea that there is a technique technocratic fix which will give me completely predictable outcomes with zero corruption. No, it's about managing that competition and finding systems that actually promote that adaptation and with some checks and balances it's a completely different way of thinking. So actually, what we are suggesting is highly radical and we welcome critiques. There are lots of obvious problems with it, like, you know, how do you make sure it doesn't go out of control which was really your question, but you make it not go out of control by actually keeping the scale appropriate right you restrict it to some levels of distribution and scaling, where the adaptation is feasible physically and where you can scale it up. But I think these are really important questions I'm not going to go on for too long because I might come in because we are just Jonathan do you have a few quick things. Yeah I think we talked later that well in terms of the kinds of measures you need to introduce into a process like this. The Afghanistan basic package on health services I think is a really interesting case to look back at and say, it's kind of proof of concept in many ways that you can create very large scaling networks that cover an entire country, connected firmly to a ministry of health in a way that does promote efficiency. It met, you know this package met its MDG goal for cutting infant maternal mortality in half by 2015 for example, but there was constant complaints of corruption in the system. But you had these really interesting moments where the ministry of health had to go to say, you know, we're not going to do curative we're going to focus on primary health care and there was a big battle there. And after six months of building the infrastructure for this package by bringing in NGOs and other providers. You had to merge or compromise to build incentives for using the same infrastructure to do curative as well because the elites in Kabul and others wanted curative care. So there is this adaptation and compromise and trade off happening in that system to do this work. At the same time, you have this very large scaling framework going all the way down to very local levels, creating those feedback loops and adapting to very different circumstances in Afghanistan, conflict and surgeon areas and one side disaster prone So this becomes potentially a case to look back and say, what more intentionality we have brought in on an anti corruption focus. That's doing some of these other things, like resilience like adaptation like scale. But all this to say that if these things are being done they're just not being done in a very formal way, and there are ways to improve it. If you have the right lens and I think this framework brings and introduces that lens. So we have put in a few, you know, sort of folding up housekeeping points on chat. You know you can find us on on the website if you have any more questions from this session, please feel free to drop us a line. It's a new piece of research. We are excited about it but we'd love to get feedback from you we'd love to make this a conversation that keeps keeps rolling on the thank you again. Thank you Jonathan, especially for for joining it. It's early for you we know but thank you once again thank you to everyone who signed on and hope to keep the conversation going have a good day everybody. Thank you. Thank you once again. Bye bye.