# **3** Conceptual Framework

## **3.1 Explanatory Framework: Delivery Challenges**

The exploration of past research demonstrated the need for a comprehensive joint analysis of the impact that various implementation issues can have on Bank performance and the project outcomes. By taking this approach, we strive to account for possible correlates of project success more thoroughly than would be feasible through a sector- or region-specific examination of project indicators. We achieve this with the data compiled in the delivery challenge framework. The taxonomy provides an overarching examination of critical success factors for World Bank projects. Examining the possible symptoms of failure across three broad phases (planning, implementation, and completion), the more holistic approach employed here allows for a robust analysis of project success while creating parameters that are not bound to sectoral and regional specificities. Thus, the data used offer opportunities for generalization, allowing for the examination of the most critical factors at each phase of the project. This is combined with an exhaustive treatment of the relative impact of each challenge on outcome ratings, overall Bank performance, and quality of supervision. By testing the delivery challenges against pre-existing macro- and micro-determinants of project success, this paper offers a systematic breakdown of the location, frequency, and impact of the most challenging obstacles faced by practitioners throughout the disbursement process.

Delivery challenges are central to understanding the intricate underpinnings of project success. Complex linkages between a diverse series of factors have led to an unfortunate reliance on allencompassing jargon such as “institutional weakness” or “lack of political will.” These heuristics provide a general sense of the underlying difficulties faced, but lack an important element of analytical rigor that would allow them to be compared across different projects and in a variety of different contexts. Simply put, current metrics for “what went wrong” have been defined with insufficient specificity, in a way that does not properly capture the extent of variation across different delivery projects. One issue involves the inherently subjective conceptual framework that underlies many delivery challenges. Guided by both the literature and the practical experiences of project managers, the delivery challenge taxonomy offers a set of cross-comparable definitions based on three insights.

First, a review of the literature showed that similar delivery challenges were often referred to in different ways, preventing comparison across cases and projects. Standardized categories were formed to capture these issues. Second, challenges were often defined in overly broad terms, creating difficulties in establishing a sufficiently precise metric of concepts for analysis. The overarching categories were correspondingly disaggregated to capture as much granularity as possible. Third, consultations with practitioners and experts in different fields across multiple organizations allowed for cross-validation of the proposed delivery challenge taxonomy, ensuring that the categories identified were in line with the tangible challenges that practitioners faced in implementing development projects. These principles played a central role in generating the taxonomy, consisting of 14 categories and 42 nested subcategories. Tables 1 to 3 provide a summary of the challenges as divided into three clusters encompassing project-, stakeholder-, and context-based challenges.

Observations were clustered according to whether the identified challenges were related to internal project dynamics, interactions with relevant stakeholders, or external factors inherent to the implementation environment. Three categories emerged within the first cluster, addressing issues with project design, financing, and monitoring. Project design challenges address issues relating to the scope of objectives, allocation or time and sequencing of deliverables, as well as general targeting 7