natural resource rents,<sup>47</sup> especially oil and mineral rents, to GDP is much higher on average than in the rest of the world, lagging only the MENA region – as exemplified by the poor governance track-record of resource-rich African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola or Nigeria. But even these countries experience areas of progress and ‘pockets of effectiveness’. Even though the public sector can be dysfunctional in those countries, some parts of the state usually manage to be more effective with better results (Hickey 2023). A great deal of contextual knowledge, as well as strategic opportunism, is therefore needed to craft effective governance reforms.

Third, not all good things go together. Among other things, the widely held assumption in the early 2000s that democratic transition on the continent would go hand in hand with better governance has not systematically passed empirical tests. While democracy tends to be good for governance, the _transition_ toward a democratic system is a time of high institutional vulnerability. Country experience shows, for example, that both grand and petty corruption can increase during transition times, and that the introduction of elections can initially reinforce clientelist behavior among electoral competitors or shorten policy makers’ policy horizons and decrease incentives for long-term public investments. These considerations should not be understood as a call to reconsider support to democratic transition or promote autocratic governance. Indeed, while countries with top-down, authoritarian models of governance, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia, have at different points in time managed to successfully introduce select governance reforms, this has happened at the cost of limited political opening and accountability, which creates mid- to long-term risks to political stability and development. Ethiopia is a case in point: autocratic governance backfired into civil conflict, ultimately undermining reform progress and the country’s development.

Finally, and related to all of the above, reformers must confront politics. This holds true for governments and donors alike. Reform success has hinged on the ability of policy makers to harness politics in their favor. Many of the failures of the good governance agenda, which has been promoted by international development agencies since the 1990s, can be traced back to an attempt to replicate ‘best practices’, which have tended to ignore, bracket, or underplay the social and political context in which institutions are located, rather than develop ‘best fit’, cognizant of the country’s context and of the power struggles at play in governance reforms (Grindle 2004, World Bank 2017<sup>48</sup> ). The uneven impact of donor support for governance reforms results to a large extent from the inadequate consideration of local politics and power relations. In recent years, recognition of the limits of donor support has pushed development practice further toward confronting power and politics, as evidenced by the analyses offered in the 2017 WDR that saw the gap between policy adoption and implementation (and its resolution) in relation to “power asymmetries” and “political settlements”. Such an approach calls for unpacking policy makers’

> 47 Total natural resources rents are the sum of oil rents, natural gas rents, coal rents (hard and soft), mineral rents, and forest rents (World Development Indicators, World Bank).

> 48 See also Andrews, M., Pritchett, L. & Woolcock, M. 2012. “Escaping capability traps through problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA)”. _CGD Working Paper_ No. 299. Washington, DC, Center for Global Development. Grindle, M.S. 2004. “Good enough governance: poverty reduction and reform in developing countries”. _Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions_ , 17(4): 525–548.

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