jurisdictions up, and examining how it shapes incentives and norms across different types of state agencies. Any policy reform to how state personnel are recruited and managed within a particular department—such as in the case of health workers in the Ceara example—would have to be accompanied by communication campaigns to shift expectations. Such communication campaigns, targeted at existing problems of weak incentives and norms, are a necessary complement to technical reforms, even if a particular campaign fails to produce improved results. Failure means going back to the drawing board and re-thinking how to change the communication strategy and re-test a different design.<sup>15</sup> As a reminder of the discussion earlier, communication is the necessary complement to bring about change in low-effort norms, because shifting norms requires updating beliefs about how others are behaving. Identifying the role of communication as a complement to other technical reforms requires equal scientific investigation, and careful design based on better understanding how principal-agent problems function in public agencies.

Effective communication campaigns that shift political norms could also make the difference for which management models work better than others. High-powered incentive contracts, for example, where a community health worker’s wages are dependent upon how many pregnant women she brings to deliver in clinics, may work better in an RCT compared to giving flat wages, when the local political context sustains a low-effort norm. However, flat wages _plus_ a communication campaign that shifts the local political equilibrium may, in theory, out-perform the high-powered incentive contract. Future research-policy collaboration should test such interactions between communication and management reforms to identify more efficient ways of building state capacity.

To summarize: one set of new ideas offered here is a role for information and mass media in shifting norms. This role is very different from prior work on information campaigns for 15 The argument in this paper that communication campaigns are necessary to build state capacity would naturally raise the question: what is the evidence on the impact of information and communication interventions? World Bank (2016) was tasked with taking stock of the evidence and concluded that both citizens and politicians in developing countries are highly responsive to information, within a variety of institutional contexts. The evidence is consistent with the theory of principal-agent problems—information asymmetries are inherent parts of the problem, and provision of greater information typically leads to changes in the actions undertaken by politicians and citizens. That is, the report concluded that the appropriate question to ask is what information, communicated how, to whom, can help solve principalagent problems in the public sector; **not** , does information work? The net result, in terms of development outcomes, of any specific information provision initiative depends upon what actions were taken in response by both politicians and citizens. The net result also depends upon whether the information provided was relevant to the actors whose behavior was targeted, and on the quality of information (whether fake or true news). Post publication of this World Bank stock-taking report, a group of political scientists have coordinated studies across multiple contexts to pull together meta-evidence on whether vote shares in developing countries change as a result of giving information to voters (http://egap.org/metaketa/metaketa-information-and-accountability). The informal word (at the time of writing this draft of the paper) is that this project is finding precisely estimated zero results—that is, vote shares accruing to different political parties and candidates do not shift after the provision of information to voters. This suggests that the design of information provided in these campaigns was either not salient to voters and politicians, or that each took actions that resulted in net zero results. For example, knowing that voters were going to receive information that would change their behavior in certain directions, politicians might have incorporated it into their electoral strategies (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2013).

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