Public Policy Design in Developing Societies

Abstract

The transplantation of public policies is a powerful tool in the hands of economic development. Powerful as it may be, transplantation verbatim et litteratim is not inevitably successful, thus not always desirable. There are good economic reasons to consider the practice of grafting in public policy transplants, i.e., consideration for the specificities of existing local institutions and how they may interact with a set of more overarching policy requirements and guidelines. An architecture for public policy design that institutionalizes some sort of negotiation between policy makers and stakeholders may provide a midway that avoids some of the intrinsic risks of standard transplantation architectures.