stakeholders, step by step experimentation, and political acceptance are more likely to lead to institutional solutions to problems that will be adopted.

Another approach can be traced to the “Innovation for Successful Societies” (ISS) program at Princeton University which collects case studies of institutional change, relying on first person interviews of participants in institutional reform. The ISS program provides the following logic for their approach: _The two main strands of scholarship on institutions have both focused on sources of stability, not change. Rational choice approaches usually model institutions as equilibria, while historical institutionalist accounts often point to forms of path dependence that lock countries into particular organizational forms, policies or ways of doing things. In some of our work, we use case studies to help generate propositions or theories about why some reformers in some settings are able to depart from existing structures, rules, or norms while others are not. That is, we use some of our case studies as the basis for inductive generalization_<sup>3</sup> .

The approach taken in this paper follows the ISS logic in that it looks at particular cases of institutional change in Cameroon to derive some general insights about how change happens. The approach also has some similarities to the experimental method described by Andrews and adds an explicit discussion of the political and bureaucratic context. But we also add an element of what we consider to be a useful innovation. In describing why one approach worked and the other did not, we turn to a discipline which has hitherto not been widely used to describe the processes that drive or block change in institutions: behavioral economics.

The burgeoning field of behavioral economics focuses to a significant extent on how individuals respond to information and incentives, and challenges the notion that individuals are always rational and always maximizing utility. The suggestion is that in fact individuals often lack information or are not always consistent in their behaviors and often act in ways that deliver a perverse result relative to the expectations of conventional economics. Specific ideas, such as prospect theory, loss aversion, and the fallacy of planning have been developed by Kahnemann, which potentially have rich application to explaining behavior within large bureaucracies (including development agency bureaucracies) and in political systems.

Despite a large literature on public management, little attention has been given to the problem of behavior within public sector organizations and its implications for the problem of public sector performance<sup>4</sup> . Other than some conventional thinking on pay incentives and performance and some recent work on the politics of public sector reform, there is little in the literature to explain why so many public sector reform attempts fail. Lack of political commitment is a typical explanation but that begs the question, why initiate a reform? More likely the answer requires us to unlock the nature of behavior

> 3 See http://www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties/research/more-on-case-studies/.

> 4 There is the classic work of Oliver Williamson, and Jensen and Meckling on organizations and agency and control in profit seeking firms but less work on government organizations. A search of the Google and SSRN database turns up only a reference to Behavioral Economics perspective on pension plans.

4