and Volden 2016, p.297). In particular, two of the paradoxes identified by Knut and Volden appear to be relevant to a delivery challenge-based approach to project success. First, fewer resources are used “up front to identify the best conceptual solution (project governance), than to improve tactical performance during implementation (project management)...once decisions are made, essential choices become locked and it is more difficult and expensive to change the overall design” (Ibid, p.301). The relevance of a delivery challenge-based approach to project success appears intuitive: such a format allows scholars and practitioners to focus on the specific factors that inform project success at its conception.

Second, the alternative extreme can also present a challenge to project delivery. Project leaders can become overwhelmed with an abundance of less-than relevant information. “Adding information, therefore, makes sense - but only to a certain degree. Projects are path-dependent, so adding useful information at the offset is valuable.” Once again, the approach advocated here allows us to hone in on the specific factors whose inclusion and examination would provide the greatest return in terms of maximizing the likelihood of project success. Addressing the most common and pertinent symptoms also allows for controlling for these effects and focusing on the role of less tangible factors. Thus, we hope that this approach offers a way to benchmark across projects, over both sectoral and regional lines.

Taking into account the wide swath of analysis already conducted in this subject area, we may discern a trend towards greater focus on project-level determinants as a means of assessing the success of World Bank project investments. Previous literature that has taken a broader approach towards project success has touched upon the various individual aspects of what may be dubbed delivery challenges. These include factors related to project design, sequencing, socio-cultural issues, coordination, and a battery of other indicators related to the social, political, economic, geographic, and normative environments in which projects are implemented. However, each has been explored in relative isolation, outside the context of an overarching typology of the various paths to implementation failure.

In this paper, we use practitioner assessments of implementation challenges as a diagnostic tool for assessing the relative impact a nearly-comprehensive set of potential obstacles may have on a project’s ultimate outcome and the Bank’s overall performance. The inductively-generated taxonomy captures the set of issues project leaders identified as having an impact on the overall success of the disbursement. We test these alongside other potentially omitted correlates to gauge their substantive impact relative to one another. Iterated model averaging runs using a variety of different theoretical priors ensure that the standardized coefficients attributed to each challenge remain robust regardless of the impact other potentially exogenous factors may have. By taking a more holistic view, we attempt to examine a wider swath of the potential variation in project outcome, be it related to external conditions, the design of the project itself, or a function of the interaction between Bank staff and local actors. To achieve this end, the dataset of delivery challenges offers the most complete agglomeration of project-level indicators compiled thus far (Ortega Nieto and Agarwal, 2017). By approaching project challenges “from cradle to grave,” we offer a more complete view of the range of variation that has impacted project success over the last two decades. The next section will explore in greater depth the conceptual framework underlying our analysis, offering a brief overview of the delivery challenge framework as well as a review of the methodology employed to examine the determinants of project success.

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