What one reform process taught me about diagnosis, partnership and institutional ownership
I first came to know the country through data. Before the fellowship, I had contributed to a poverty and gender assessment that examined its socioeconomic conditions, the inequalities shaping people’s lives and the development challenges confronting the state. Through that research, I developed an analytical view from outside government, assembled through datasets, research questions and the careful interpretation of evidence.
My professional interests had long centred on Africa’s economic transformation and the institutions required to sustain it. The fellowship therefore carried deep personal and professional meaning. It offered an opportunity to cross the distance between analysing public problems and working alongside the people responsible for addressing them, to see how evidence travelled through government and to contribute directly to policy and institutional reform.
I arrived excited, curious and conscious of the responsibility. It was my first experience working inside the government of another African country, and I entered at a demanding moment. The country was continuing a democratic transition while recovering from a pandemic that had placed severe pressure on an economy strongly dependent on tourism. The national development agenda was ambitious, public expectations were understandably high and the institutions expected to deliver that agenda were working under significant administrative and resource constraints.
My previous work had included policy research, quantitative analysis and development programmes, often with the relative clarity that comes when researchers define a question, agree a methodology and specify an output. This role placed me much closer to the centre of policy coordination, where the responsibilities were broader: supporting policy design, conducting analysis for decision-making, developing frameworks and tools, strengthening institutional capability and engaging stakeholders who held competing perspectives.
I was eager to move beyond reports and immerse myself in the reality of policymaking. I wanted to understand what happened after researchers completed an analysis, how evidence competed with urgency and political judgement, why sensible recommendations sometimes moved slowly and what it actually took for a reform to endure inside a public institution.
At first, I imagined that the principal challenge would be technical. If we could diagnose the weaknesses in the policy system carefully enough, learn from relevant experience elsewhere and respond with stronger analytical methods, clearer guidance and better tools, then more consistent policymaking should follow. My training had taught me to value evidence, methodological discipline and logical structure.
The size of the challenge became apparent almost immediately. The assignment concerned the entire system through which many different public institutions identified problems, developed policies, coordinated responsibilities, secured approval, planned implementation and reviewed results. It extended across formal mandates, professional relationships, sector expertise, political priorities, planning and budgeting processes, and institutional practices that had accumulated over many years.
The central problem still lacked a clear definition. Almost everyone I encountered believed that government needed to improve its approach to public policy development. That shared conviction covered several possible explanations for what was failing, why it was happening and where reform should begin. Some people spoke about inconsistency, others about coordination, evidence, implementation or the quality of policy documents. Each concern pointed towards something important, and together they still lacked the structure that rigorous analysis required.
That tension became the real beginning of the work. Before I could think responsibly about solutions, I had to understand how these different experiences connected and frame the problem with enough structure for academic inquiry while remaining faithful to the accounts of people working inside the system.
What followed was a journey from informal conversations to a concept document, from multiple rounds of feedback to a diagnostic study, and from the findings of that study to a national policy development handbook that its intended users helped shape. The most meaningful outcome was the gradual strengthening of a system in which public officials could take greater responsibility for developing their own policies. External consultants continued to contribute when useful, while government retained the ownership, knowledge and judgement required to sustain the work.
I had entered the fellowship eager to contribute technical expertise. I soon learned that the deeper task was to understand the institution on its own terms and help create a process through which officials could organise, strengthen and sustain their existing expertise.
Begin with the system that already exists
The first serious challenge involved defining the problem in a form that could support rigorous inquiry. That definition had to precede the research design, document collection and selection of international comparisons.
The broad agreement I had encountered gave the work legitimacy. The statement we need to improve the way we do policies expressed a shared aspiration. We still needed a researchable definition that could locate the central source of difficulty across the quality of policy documents, the development sequence, the use of evidence, the distribution of responsibilities, the connection to implementation and the mechanisms for monitoring and review.
This is one of the most demanding features of practical public policy and governance work. Problems rarely arrive with agreed boundaries, stable definitions and variables ready for measurement. What initially appears as a single weakness may express several connected problems that people experience differently across government. Each person sees the system from a particular institutional position and contributes one part of a larger picture.
I therefore began in a deliberately modest way, through quick questions and informal conversations with people occupying different parts of the policy space. I planned some exchanges and allowed others to develop as informal professional conversations while I learned how the system worked. I asked how policy ideas usually began, what made some initiatives move more smoothly than others, where officials experienced uncertainty and what they believed would make their work more coherent. Together, these conversations revealed recurring themes, disagreements and missing connections.
I documented this emerging understanding in what I initially treated as a concept document. Writing it down forced me to move beyond a loose collection of impressions and express the problem in a structured form: what appeared to be happening, why it mattered, which parts of the policy process required closer examination and what evidence would distinguish assumption from fact. I used the document to expose my provisional understanding to questions and corrections from other people.
I shared the concept document with relevant stakeholders and invited them to correct what I had misunderstood, add what I had overlooked and challenge the way I had framed the problem. Their feedback reshaped the document in all three ways. With each iteration, some assumptions weakened, other concerns became more precise and the relationship between apparently separate issues grew clearer. The concept document served as a planning instrument and a shared surface on which different institutional perspectives could meet.
After multiple rounds of revision, I had a working concept note that was sufficiently clear to guide the diagnostic study. The note preserved the uncertainty inherent in institutional problems and transformed a broadly expressed desire for better policymaking into a coherent set of questions. We could now examine those questions through policy documents, institutional experience and the movement of policy ideas from initial recognition to formulation, approval, implementation and review.
Only at that point could the diagnostic study become a genuinely rigorous academic endeavour. We designed the inquiry to understand the system in full: its formal rules, accumulated strengths, informal workarounds, professional relationships and the points at which otherwise promising initiatives could lose momentum.
This progression from conversation to concept note and then to formal study became the first lesson of the entire reform. Before a government can solve a policy-system problem, it needs a way to see that problem clearly enough to study it, discuss it and build a shared understanding of what meaningful improvement would require.
What the diagnosis made visible
Completing the concept note gave me a clearer research direction and revealed the scale of what we had begun. The diagnostic study required us to move beyond individual impressions and examine the policy process as a connected system. We reviewed policy materials, considered the structure and content of existing documents, listened to institutional experience and traced the different stages through which officials moved public policies.
The questions were practical as much as academic. How does an issue enter the policy agenda, and whose recognition gives it legitimacy? Who participates before a team drafts a proposal, and who joins after the team has already made important choices? At what stage do officials consider evidence, affordability and implementation risk? Which institution can request revisions, and does it possess sufficient authority to make those requests consequential? Which person or institution retains responsibility after approval? When officials review progress, does the information generate adaptation or merely another report?
As the picture became clearer, one conclusion carried particular importance. Public officials possessed extensive intelligence, commitment and sector knowledge. They understood their mandates, the communities affected by policy choices, the practical constraints surrounding implementation and the administrative history behind decisions. The policy-development process needed a consistent structure through which officials could assemble, test, document and convert that knowledge into a coherent policy.
This finding changed how I understood my own role. People and institutions across government held substantial knowledge, spoke different professional languages and connected only loosely through the existing policy-development process. The reform needed to organise and strengthen that expertise through a common process.
Where such a structure is weak, governments can become heavily dependent on external consultants to perform the substantive work of policy development. Consultants may bring valuable technical expertise, international experience and additional capacity, especially where institutions are dealing with complex or specialised issues. When external teams take over the entire process, government loses an important opportunity for institutional learning. Consultants may complete the document and depart with much of the reasoning, analytical confidence and knowledge required for future revision.
The reform therefore had to redefine the relationship between external support and internal ownership.
This insight shaped the direction of the reform. We designed a framework that helped public officials lead policy development and created clear, productive roles for consultants, researchers and development partners when the work required their expertise.
Partnership as a working method
Once I understood the problem in this way, I made partnership the organising method for the technical work.
One of the most important lessons from this experience concerns the way external experts and institutions approach governments in developing countries. Too much technical assistance begins, even if unintentionally, from a language of absence: limited capacity, weak institutions, missing systems and insufficient expertise. When this language dominates the assessment, outsiders design reform around perceived deficits and overlook the knowledge, experience and agency already present within government.
I found a partnership posture more useful. I treated public officials as partners in inquiry and design, with knowledge essential to understanding why existing practices had developed, where proposed reforms might encounter difficulty and which tools could realistically fit the rhythms of government work.
Respect becomes meaningful when it changes how we organise the work. We involved officials while we framed the problem and kept the analytical choices open to their influence. We shared early drafts, invited substantial revision, listened carefully when an elegant proposal proved impractical and recognised the limits of our familiarity with international practice.
This approach supports honest disagreement, constructive challenge and the introduction of new analytical standards. Partnership turns reform into a shared process of reasoning in which participants bring different forms of expertise into direct conversation.
The public official may understand the administrative history, legal mandate and implementation constraints of the institution. The researcher may offer a method for testing assumptions and organising evidence. A consultant may bring specialised knowledge or experience from other systems. Combining these contributions creates a stronger foundation for durable reform and preserves the distinct value of each source of knowledge.
Partnership provides a methodology for producing better institutional knowledge and a practical safeguard against technically impressive, administratively unusable tools.
From diagnostic study to practical handbook
When we completed the diagnostic study, I felt the satisfaction that comes from finally seeing a complicated problem with greater clarity. The findings established a direction and created a new pressure to translate insight into guidance for officials preparing, reviewing or revising a policy proposal during a demanding working day.
The next stage required us to turn broad recommendations into a practical sequence that people could use. We examined relevant approaches from other national policy systems and drew on wider guidance concerning policy design, participation, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and learning. Comparative experience expanded the range of possibilities, and local diagnosis disciplined our choices. We adapted the elements we retained to existing laws, institutional responsibilities, professional language and administrative routines.
We circulated drafts, invited officials to question them and revised the material in response. Public officials applied early templates to current assignments and identified unclear instructions, requests for information that came too early, and overlapping responsibilities. Practical use exposed complications that we had missed during drafting and revealed gaps as officials moved from one proposed stage to the next.
The feedback reshaped the substance and wording of the product. We developed a practical handbook that accompanied templates with explanation, analytical guidance and a clearer account of institutional responsibility. Officials also strengthened its treatment of implementation, review, inclusion and the relationship between a policy document and the action that should follow from it.
This process deepened my understanding of ownership. Validation meetings, approvals and signatures formally recognise government ownership at the end of a process. Our collaborative work cultivated that ownership from the beginning as officials questioned assumptions, tested tools, contributed language, resolved uncertainty and recognised their institutional experience in the final product.
We strengthened the handbook through repeated movement between analytical ambition and administrative reality, directing its rigour towards everyday use.
Building capability through practice
Alongside the development of the handbook, we conducted capacity-building workshops and training sessions for policy designers, planners and policymakers. We used these sessions to introduce the framework, explain the purpose of the tools and create space for participants to apply them to policy questions that reflected their everyday responsibilities.
Participants worked through the stages of problem definition, concept development, evidence use, policy-option analysis, stakeholder engagement, implementation planning, results measurement and review. Practical exercises helped them connect each template to the reasoning it was intended to support. The sessions also created a shared language that officials from different institutions could use when discussing the quality, readiness and implementation requirements of a policy proposal.
The workshops extended the co-production process. Participants raised questions that exposed unclear explanations, stages that placed unrealistic demands on officials and areas where policymakers needed additional support. We used their experience to improve examples, clarify instructions and strengthen the relationship between the handbook’s guidance and the realities of policy work.
We treated each workshop as the beginning of applied learning. Follow-up technical consultations and repeated use on current assignments gave officials opportunities to ask new questions as they encountered real constraints. Through that process, familiarity developed into confidence, and officials gained a stronger basis for leading internal policy teams, reviewing work developed with consultants and applying the tools with professional judgement.
This investment in capability contributed to moving policy development further inside government. Officials could use a common process, understand the reasoning behind its requirements and retain the knowledge that teams generate during policy formulation. The workshops therefore connected the handbook to one of the reform’s central ambitions: enabling public institutions to lead their own policy development and use external expertise strategically.
Rigour designed for practical use
By this stage of the work, I had become wary of confusing comprehensiveness with usefulness. Designers often add complexity to policy tools to demonstrate technical seriousness, including every possible question, analytical method and process stage. The resulting tool may satisfy a formal review and still overwhelm officials who face limited time, incomplete data and several competing responsibilities.
Our aim was to create tools that served the everyday needs of policymakers. A concept document should help an official decide whether a team has developed a policy idea sufficiently to justify further work. A needs assessment should support clearer problem definition. Guidance on policy options should encourage genuine comparison among possible solutions. An implementation plan should clarify actions, responsibilities, timelines, resources and risks. A results framework should make the intended chain of change visible enough to monitor, question and revise.
These tools create value through the quality of reasoning they encourage. A standard template becomes useful when it reminds a busy policy team to ask a necessary question at the right stage. A repository becomes valuable when it supports consultation, access, scheduled review and institutional memory. A monitoring instrument matters when its information enters a real discussion, prompts a response and returns later as a question about whether the agreed action occurred.
I came to understand practicality as disciplined attention to use. It requires the designer to ask who will use the tool, at what moment, with which information, under whose authority and towards what decision. These questions prevent a toolkit from becoming an additional layer of paperwork detached from the real movement of public business.
A sophisticated framework preserves analytical seriousness and remains usable enough to become part of routine practice.
The clearest impact is who now does the work
Looking back, I see the clearest impact in the growing ownership of policy development and the confidence with which public officials now lead work that external teams previously handled.
In the policy processes I observed following the introduction of the framework, public officials increasingly took responsibility for substantive policy development, sometimes working independently and sometimes collaborating with consultants. The pattern varied across policies, and the overall direction represented an important movement of capability, confidence and responsibility towards the institutions that must implement and sustain them.
Developing policy in-house changes authorship, learning and institutional memory. Officials who participate throughout the process engage directly with the evidence, negotiate priorities, confront implementation constraints and understand the reasoning behind particular choices. The resulting policy carries the reasoning and institutional knowledge developed within government, and the officials who remain after drafting understand the choices that shaped it.
This creates a stronger foundation for implementation and future review. When circumstances change, officials can revisit assumptions, revise an action plan or explain the logic behind a policy decision. The institution accumulates knowledge across successive policy processes, and public officials build confidence through their work as analysts and authors who can lead the process.
Consultants continue to have an important role. Some policy issues require specialised expertise, comparative knowledge, independent challenge or additional analytical capacity beyond government’s resources at a particular moment. A clearer government-led process now gives external experts a defined structure for working with officials who understand the required stages, questions and outputs.
Under this model, clear responsibilities make collaboration with consultants more productive. The consultant contributes expertise, public officials provide context and lead the institutional process, and the framework supplies a common structure for their work. Government retains responsibility for the policy.
That is the deeper meaning of moving beyond toolkits. The tools help government lead the work and use outside expertise from a position of institutional ownership.
Lessons I would carry into future reform
Looking back, one of the clearest lessons is the importance of helping an institution develop a shared and researchable understanding of its problem before moving towards solutions. Informal conversations and a provisional concept document can reveal how people across an institution experience the same broad concern, while successive rounds of feedback turn problem definition into a collective act of inquiry. This approach creates a stronger foundation for research because the diagnostic questions emerge from institutional reality and remain open to evidence that may challenge the original framing.
I also learned to engage public officials as knowledge partners throughout the assignment. They possess practical, sectoral and institutional knowledge that takes time and sustained proximity to acquire. I involved them in framing questions, interpreting evidence, testing proposed tools and shaping the final product. Their expertise gave the resulting system greater credibility and a closer fit with administrative reality, while critical analysis and high professional standards kept the process intellectually demanding.
What became equally clear was that partnership needs continuity through diagnosis, drafting, testing, revision and early implementation. Sustained participation allows concerns to surface while important choices remain open, distributes knowledge across the institution and gives officials time to shape the reform through their own experience. Honest disagreement often provides some of the most valuable sources of improvement when participants trust that the process will take their challenge seriously.
Another lesson concerns the ordinary working conditions under which policymakers use technical tools. I learned to design for the official facing a deadline, incomplete information and several competing responsibilities, asking at every stage how the tool could clarify the work. Practical tools use understandable language, request information when officials can reasonably produce it and connect each analytical step to a decision or responsibility. Simplicity can preserve rigorous questions and increase the consistency with which policy teams ask them.
Capacity building emerged as part of the same practical commitment. I learned to approach workshops as the beginning of applied learning, using them to introduce the framework, build a shared language and give officials space to practise unfamiliar methods. Repeated application, follow-up consultation and feedback then helped participants develop enough confidence to lead a policy process, explain the reasoning behind the tools, adapt them intelligently and guide colleagues encountering the framework for the first time.
In the same spirit, I would use external expertise to expand internal capability. External experts can introduce methods, provide specialist analysis, challenge assumptions and share comparative experience, while public officials lead the institutional process and participate deeply enough to understand the reasoning behind the final product. This arrangement can transfer knowledge, preserve institutional memory and build confident partnership over time.
Ultimately, I would measure impact through changed practice and ownership. I would look for officials using the framework on their own initiative, policy development occurring increasingly inside government, consultants working through national systems and responsibilities remaining clear when personnel change. Evidence should enter decisions at predictable points, and officials should be able to adapt the tools intelligently and revise policies because they understand how and why people developed them. These changes show that ownership has become part of routine practice.
Sustaining these gains requires continued institutional attention. Leaders need to reinforce use of the framework, connect policy design more firmly to budgeting and implementation, and create space for teams to reflect on experience from actual policy assignments. New officials need orientation, experienced users need refresher opportunities, and policymakers need practical channels through which they can seek technical guidance. Periodic review will allow the institution to update the handbook as responsibilities, evidence requirements and administrative conditions evolve.
Beyond the completed document
The formal adoption of a national policy development handbook remains an achievement of which I am deeply proud. It created a common reference point, translated a broad reform ambition into practical guidance and demonstrated what patient collaboration between public officials, technical specialists and institutional leaders could produce.
The most important story continues after formal adoption. It unfolds when an official uses a concept note to turn a loosely expressed idea into a disciplined proposal, when a policy team compares several options, when an implementation plan forces an honest discussion about responsibility and resources, and when government leads the drafting process with consultants working as partners.
This approach requires time for learning, disagreement, iteration and the development of professional confidence. Through that investment, the institution retains more of the knowledge produced through policymaking and strengthens its ability to respond when circumstances change.
The fellowship also changed my understanding of why physical presence matters in institutional work. Before taking the role, I had considered contributing remotely, as I had done in other research and consultancy settings. My embedded position enabled the informal conversations, repeated clarifications and gradual relationships through which the real problem became visible. Direct experience showed me the full texture of how policy work moved through the institution, where it slowed, why people approached it differently and how much patient effort meaningful change required.
The ultimate purpose of a toolkit is to help public institutions strengthen their own capacity to define problems, organise evidence, make difficult choices and learn from implementation.
Success becomes meaningful when public officials continue to use, improve and take ownership of the policy process long after the original design team has left the room.
Junior Abdul-Wahab 