A review of the literature on technical assistance highlights a series of challenges that are shared between government-funded technical assistance and externally funded, or third-party, technical assistance. Of these, attempts to transplant institutional models and best practice standards occur most often and have shown limited success in enabling governments to improve their functioning. It is increasingly well recognised that technical assistance often facilitates changes in the ‘form’ of institutions, without necessarily affecting their ‘function’. This issue has also been termed isomorphic mimicry ( Andrews et al., 2012). In effect, while the assistance may help in the Development of technical systems and processes, it can be unsuccessful in changing the actual functions that an organisation performs, which is linked to the individual behaviours ( Williamson, 2015).

This challenge is particularly acute in environments where external financing of government functions is critical (e.g. when governments are dependent on development financing, or where state governments depend on significant federal transfers to finance their budgets). Repeated isomorphic mimicry projects, policies, and programmes lead to capability traps – a cycle whereby governments are constantly adopting reforms, partly to ensure ongoing flows of external financing and legitimacy, without any tangible improvements. These capability traps emerge when there are efforts to reproduce templated solutions that are considered ‘best practice’ through predetermined linear processes, or where there is an overbearing adherence to a rigid plan for implementation ( Andrews et al., 2012). For instance, there are indications that fragile and conflict-affected states are quicker to adopt results-based financing in health as compare to more stable countries, given their dependence on external funding, but also weak governance arrangements (Bertone et al., 2018)

Unclear expectations from capacity development initiatives exacerbate challenges related to isomorphic mimicry and capability traps. There are various reasons for this, starting with programme designs that include unrealistic theories of change and action, logic frameworks that focus on outputs and not outcomes (e.g. the number of people trained), and continuing with implementation challenges such as managing donor or government expectations with regard to the role of advisers. Frequently, technical advisers are expected to perform government functions outside the terms of reference, and sometimes substituting government functions even if the agreement was to supplement or build capacity. When this happens, some consultants may face the dilemma of responding to the request and thus build trust in the relationship with the government counterparts or push back and risk damaging the relationship. In practice, this is a difficult situation to manage and it takes commitment, and experience to navigate it in the benefit of the programme.

Patience is also a critical factor when it comes to capacity development, especially when there is external pressure on governments to deliver on targets and global agendas (including, for instance, the Millennium Development Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals etc.). Building capacity takes time: it is not risk-free and sometimes it may imply compromising the quality of results and the capacity to deliver quick wins.

Also, often sustained capacity in incumbent systems is built when the system discovers its own problems – both small and large, tests their own solutions and fail themselves – essentially transforming itself into a thinking, learning and hence, a responsive and resilient organisation. External technical assistance needs to act concurrently and patiently in breaking the inevitable falls and accelerate learning of important lessons, without prejudice or predisposition towards a templated ‘solution’.

These factors make it difficult – and sometimes even impossible – to agree on the result a technical assistance provider should seek to achieve. Should they build capacity, replace capacity and just deliver the function, or do something in the middle? Unfortunately, without clarity of the objective, technical assistance programmes oscillate between objectives: substituting capacity to produce short-term progress, but not addressing the underlying capability challenges, thus leaving the system to revert to ‘business as usual’ as soon as the technical assistance ends.

Regular changes in political priorities, or the transfer of key personnel, is often a significant barrier to lasting change in government capability. Large-scale, long-term technical assistance programmes typically do not have the same leadership at the end of the programme, or at crucial decision-making points in the middle of the programme, as they started with. Political and bureaucratic bipartisanship is often not a design feature of technical assistance programmes when they are launched. Frequent political, bureaucratic, and technocratic changes are also a defining characteristic of weak state capacity. The extreme alternative to frequently changing regimes and cadres in weak states, is an authoritarian rule, which is defined by its extractive nature, especially from external donors and aid-funded technical assistance programmes.

Inflexible theories of change and action of technical assistance programmes also hamper the holistic visioning of the pathway to long-term impact and goals. No sub-system (e.g. health, agriculture, sanitation etc.) operates in a silo of its own: they have interdependencies with other sub-systems. For example, in water resources management, there is an intricate nexus between how agriculture, energy, and ground water interact and impact each other. Not considering these interdependencies, and potential extraneous changes in the environment means that while much technical assistance has robust logframes and hypotheses, they ultimately have weak narratives on the pathways of systemic and long-term change. Also, the theories of change need to be anchored in the organisational and institutional context, which may also refer to understanding different streams of work including other ongoing initiatives of international partners, national authorities, non-state actors.

Finally, the projectized nature of technical assistance is a structural challenge. Although technical assistance engagements are signed off between the host government and donor agencies, the resources deployed on the ground – from technical experts at the highest level to the implementation support resources on the ground – typically are employed and deployed by local/international non-governmental organisations. These resources’ careers also typically move from one technical assistance project to another, funded by one agency or another. The tendency for people to seek to prolong their careers also plays out in how truly sustainable reforms eventually become (or not), as the same technical assistance resources are expected to prepare the system to wean itself of themselves, having built sufficient capacity effectively. In essence, the providers are expected to work themselves out of a job. Technical assistance is also projectised in nature due to the way public procurement rules are structured in government. Building genuine capacity through technical assistance can have ambiguous pathways of change that need to be built along the way. Most government procurement structures are not designed to support projects of this kind, but are rather focused on making procurement better defined, with clear targets and deliverables, and a strong focus on value for money.

Technical assistance programmes tend to focus on technical solutions to what are often social and political problems. In doing so, there is also a tendency to overlook rich local knowledge and fit-for-context solutions that can work well. The literature suggests that standard models for improving public sector management have little impact on the way bureaucracies or political systems work in low-income settings ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). An underlying assumption in traditional models of public sector reform is that development issues are technical problems and arise out of information asymmetry. Hence, given better information about government performance and citizens’ entitlements, actors will behave differently, and the supply of public goods will improve. With the limited success of large-scale external technical assistance, this assumption has been challenged, and the literature suggests that coordination and collective action challenges influence the behaviour of actors much more than information asymmetry does ( Booth, 2014).

Most development programmes often assume a one-way learning relationship, where the recipient is learning form the provider. In contrast, in practice, there is often a two-way exchange of ideas and ways of working. For example, donor support to anti-corruption reforms in Malawi failed due to the ‘cargo transfer’ to Malawi of anti-corruption laws and structures that did not take account of Malawi’s implementation capacity ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019).

As problematic, these one-way learning relationships encourage silos in the provision of technical assistance programmes. For instance, in global health, many actors may be genuinely committed to address the issue of coordination, they face a series of challenges, such as proliferation of global health actors; problems of global leadership; divergent interests; problems of accountability; problems of power relations (Spicer et al., 2020). This often leads to projects not being strategic, and limited coordination leads to overlaps between donors, and, in certain cases, contradictory or inconsistent reform advice ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). External technical assistance providers are bound by their individual contract and terms of reference with the funding institution and the host government. This formally shifts the onus for coordination between external parties largely onto the host government, which has weak capacity to begin with, perpetuating a vicious cycle dominated by an inter-partner dynamic where host governments take a backseat. Government ownership of critical reforms suffers in the process.

The past 10 years in international development have been characterised by an increased interest in defining more politically astute programmes. At the foundation of this movement is practitioners’ understanding that the mixed results of Development, and particularly capacity development programmes, have less to do with a lack of knowledge or funding and more with the power structures that allow actors, groups, or collective movements to gain from existing movements and to resist change ( Leftwich & Sen, 2011). As a result, different approaches emerged, involving principles, methods, and tools to operationalise more adaptive, politically informed ways of thinking and delivering technical assistance. These approaches include the following.

•    Thinking and working politically is based on three core principles: strong political analysis, insight and understanding; a detailed appreciation of and response to the local context; and flexibility and adaptability in programme design and implementation ( TWP CoP, 2013).

•    Development entrepreneurship is a form of thinking and working politically that postulates that development entrepreneurs work within a wider process of coalition building, using iterative learning by doing and making small bets to find ways to introduce reforms ( Faustino & Booth, 2014).

•    Problem-driven iterative adaptation rests on four principles: local solutions to local problems; pushing problem-driven positive deviance; trying, learning, iterating, and adapting; and scaling up through diffusion ( Andrews et al., 2015)

•    Doing development differently involves five potential starting points: swimming against the tide; working in and with government; feedback loops and data; organisational change; and diffusion ( Wild & Andrews, 2015)

•    Adaptive management is an intentional approach to making decisions and adjustments in response to new information and changes in context ( USAID, 2016).

•    The World Bank’s Global Delivery Initiative is a platform that aims to bring together knowledge of what works, and practitioners, to strengthen policy and programme delivery.

A few principles are common across these initiatives:

Locally driven technical assistance focused on developing local capacity. There is general acceptance that the only way technical assistance can create sustainable capacity is through ensuring that local problems are owned by and solved by local actors. Local actors are much more likely to have the motivation, credibility, knowledge, and networks to mobilise support, leverage relationships, and identify opportunities in politically astute ways, as compared to their external counterparts ( Andrews et al., 2012). That said, mobilising local support is not a straightforward task, and therefore technical assistance providers need to ensure that the problems that technical assistance programmes seek to address have a high level of salience to local actors.

Focus on addressing small problems. Two aspects require further consideration: focusing on problems instead of solutions and focusing on small bets to learn from, iterate, and scale up. For a long time, scholars have discussed the need to shift from solution-focused development programming to a problem-driven approach. However, the practice has been slow to follow through on this. As we speak, best practice solutions are implemented around the world in response to COVID-19, with little recognition for the particularities of context and understanding of the enabling conditions required for success. The problem is aggravated when the solutions are large reform programmes that capture a large amount of public resources. By contrast, entrepreneurship thinking suggests that many small bets are better than one large bet. Small bets make failure less costly and thus increase the degree of learning and innovation, and eventually, the effectiveness of the solutions.

Diffusion, through positive deviance. Part of the theory of change for some of the approaches mentioned above – although sometimes not explicitly mentioned – is positive deviance. This rests on the premise that the contexts in which development practitioners act in are complex, and for any given problem, someone in the community will have already identified a solution ( Green, 2016). Learning from how the solutions were possible in the first place, and supporting their diffusion within the system, is what makes a difference in Development. This is also the theory of change for some ‘pockets of effectiveness literature’ ( Hickey, 2019), although there is little evidence on their spill-over effects as regards improving performance outside the remits of the organisation these are part of ( Roll, 2014). Organisations are much more likely to pursue the path of gradual and incremental reform, through the resolution of specific problems, rather than reform by following a set blueprint.

Change as an adaptive and iterative process. There are at least two type of problems to be solved with technical assistance: logistical, with clear, proven ways of working; and wicked, involving system-wide approaches ( Andrews et al., 2015). For the second category, there is a growing recognition that reform pathways are not linear, or even technical, but deeply rooted in the political and social context of recipient countries. This has led to finding ways of working adaptively and flexibly. The core of these new ways of working is defining portfolio approaches to solve problems, and deliberate ways of testing, learning, and experimenting while supporting change ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). The main assumption is that complex change programmes cannot rely on defining the entire journey to reform upfront, but rather require defining the destination and being flexible about the entry points to get to that destination.

Adaptive management is an umbrella concept for the adaptive approach to programme design and implementation, which focuses on learning and adaption in order to get things done. Its premise is that the change we are usually seeking in Development is difficult and sometimes unpredictable, and in these conditions, the decision-making process cannot be linear, it must be iterative. Starting a journey with a GPS navigator that does not update itself based on the encountered road conditions will not take you to your destination.

More specifically, an adaptive management framework allows the programme implementers to draw on the relevant type of technical assistance at key points to push for change. In literature, this is usually referred to as having a portfolio approach. The government has a menu of options to choose from and they may build towards the final end-goal by experimenting with what works. Many development projects work on a model whereby they use in-sourcing to advance on an important task that they do not have capacity for but that they need delivered quickly (the demand-driven capacity substitution), and then they use specific technical inputs to understand a public sector delivery problem (capacity supplementation), which will be solved by the inter-departmental working groups facilitated by an external adviser (capacity development).

Technical assistance providers as facilitators rather than doers. At the heart of the emerging lessons is a growing recognition that if the goal is capacity development, the role of the technical assistance provider needs to change from that of an external resource brought in to do work on behalf of the government, towards that of a facilitator of change ( Andrews et al., 2012).The literature strongly supports this new approach, although evidence of its effectiveness is still emerging ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). An important prerequisite for this change to robustly establish itself as a paradigm is a deep sense of understanding and ownership of the problem by the incumbent government. This can be hastened and deepened when external technical assistance is intentionally indigenised, both in form and function. It takes a lot for a weak recipient of external technical assistance to not succumb to the purported urgency and professionalism of external technical assistance.

Experience shows that poorly delivered technical assistance can displace and even erode national capacities ( Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). In addition, unintended capacity substitution can occur where poor working relationships exist between external experts and government staff. These relationships can be affected by disparities in salaries, equipment, and other softer elements, which leads to low morale within government counterparts ( Le et al., 2016). The perception that external advisers are superior personnel can disrupt hierarchies within government organisations, leading to a less than conducive work environment ( Hadebe, 2016). This is exacerbated in places where the legislature (i.e. politicians) cannot or does not fully rely on the executive to implement most of its policies. This characteristic also exposes fractured accountability between politicians and the executive, and between the executive and consumers of public services.

The relationship between the government counterparts and external advisers is a crucial dynamic for the type of technical assistance being delivered. From our experience, the staffing of technical assistance programmes may influence the shape the assistance takes. For instance, junior consultants or external staff who are paid significantly lower than government counterparts may end up doing capacity substitution work as they are perceived to ‘assist’ the government. At the opposite end, the senior consultants who may be compensated significantly above the government salaries may be accepted as partners or change facilitators. Still, there will also invariably be an expectation that they will intermediate the relationship with the superiors because communication within government systems is aligned with power and hierarchical rules. Ideally, this would be addressed by properly managing expectations upfront among all relevant parties, starting with the political leadership, the bureaucracy, the donors, and the external consultants.