Policy Research Working Paper 11087
Ten Consequential and Actionable ‘Social’
Contributions to the Theory, Practice,
and Evaluation of Development
Vijayendra Rao
Michael Woolcock
Development Economics
Development Research Group
March 2025
Policy Research Working Paper 11089
Abstract
Understandings of what is unique and consequential about enhanced if its distinctive contributions were incorporated
‘social’ development vis-à-vis other sectoral domains have into everyday activity in all development sectors. The paper
evolved considerably over the past eight decades, with the outlines 10 such actionable ‘social’ contributions, making
present articulations enjoying broad acceptance in theory a case for why and how they matter—intrinsically and
while often being ignored in practice. Although adminis- instrumentally—across mainstream concerns regarding
trative imperatives within large organizations may require development processes and outcomes, in poor and rich
social development to have a stand-alone operational port- countries alike.
folio, this paper argues that its impact would be greatly
This paper is a product of the Development Research Group, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the
World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the
world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may
be contacted at vrao@worldbank.org and mwoolcock@worldbank.org.
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Ten Consequential and Actionable ‘Social’ Contributions
to the Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of Development
Vijayendra Rao (World Bank) and Michael Woolcock (World Bank)1
Keywords: Social development, culture, reflexivity, context, participation
1
The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone, who are long-standing members of the World
Bank’s Development Research Group. Its contents should not be attributed to the World Bank more generally, to its
executive directors or the countries they represent, or to the World Bank’s Department for Social Development.
Email addresses for correspondence: vrao@worldbank.org and mwoolcock@worldbank.org.
Introduction
The linguistic space within which ‘social development’ resides – in English certainly, but essentially all
other languages as well – is fraught. Even within academia itself, ‘social development’ can mean many
things; there is an established scholarly journal with this exact title, for example, but it has nothing at all
to do with ‘development’ as understood by readers of this paper; rather, it is a “scientific journal
covering developmental psychology, with a specific focus on children's behavioral development.” There
may be vastly less ambiguity regarding ‘economic development,’ but even this concept can mean
different things in different places in different languages. Consider Bahasa Indonesia, which has two
different phrases for what is translated into English as ‘economic development’: one, pembangunan,
focused on encouraging processes that, in adequate circumstances, unfold ‘naturally’ or ‘organically’
(i.e.., akin to a flower blooming), and the other, membangunan, for those processes that are
intentionally initiated and teleologically directed via the explicit deployment of human reason and
resources toward a particular goal (irrigation systems, ports and highways, formal education) (see
Heryanto 1988). In practice, these are two very different ways of engaging with the development
process: the former regarding it as mindful “gardening” (cf. Kagan 2019), the other actively promoting
“history in a hurry” (as a colleague once deftly put it). Within the economic development space itself,
core constituent concepts such as ‘property rights,’ ‘value(s),’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘inclusion,’ and ‘justice’ face
similar interpretive conundrums across different linguistic contexts, precisely because they
are social concepts (or, more formally, “essentially contested concepts,” following Gallie 1956 2).
For all this diversity, however, the evolution of how the ‘social’ aspects of development have
been understood across the last eight decades of local, national, multilateral, bilateral, and NGO activity
can be grouped into roughly four different categories. 3 At the outset, social relations were regarded as
obstacles/constraints, in which prevailing social institutions must “disintegrate,” “burst,” or be
“scrapped.” 4 In more polite company, social issues were held to be irrelevant/indifferent – entering new
contexts, one could certainly appreciate (even celebrate) different food, music, and culture, yet see
them of little or no consequence to central development concerns. As environmental issues and post-
colonial voices become more prominent, certain assertive voices – rejecting much of orthodox
development practice – upheld social institutions as sacrosanct/existential, each of the world’s seven
thousand languages and corresponding cultures constituting wondrously unique instances of human
creativity and diversity, together cumulatively comprising a veritable “ethnosphere,” any loss of which
would be akin to “a bomb going off in the Louvre” 5 and thus needing to be protected with the same
moral fervor afforded species extinction. Finally, in the mid-1990s, coinciding perhaps with the First
World Summit for Social Development, social relations found themselves cast as the “missing link” for
2
“Essentially contested concepts” elide clear definitions and measurement (Gallie suggests ‘work of art’,
‘democracy’, and ‘Christian doctrine’ as examples) yet remain of central importance, doing their work through the
deliberative discussions they elicit.
3
See the slightly longer discussion on these four broad categories in Woolcock (2017).
4
Not soon after its founding, the United Nations (1951: 15) infamously declared that “…rapid economic progress is
impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped: old social institutions have to
disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of people who cannot keep up with
progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay
the full price of economic progress” (cited in Escobar 1995: 3). Similarly, modernization theory predominantly,
though not exclusively, regarded prevailing social institutions as a constraint on development, if not the basis of
‘underdevelopment’ itself.
5
Davis (2009: 5), citing linguist Ken Hale.
2
enhancing broad economic development outcomes, for “making democracy work,” and improving the
general efficacy of specific development policies and projects. 6
Versions of these four views (or counterclaims seeking to refine or refute them) continue to this
day, but here we seek to argue for a more nuanced fifth perspective, one stressing the deeply
constituent roles that social development issues play across all sectors of development. In the brief
sections that follow, we identify 10 key social development issues we regard as distinctive,
consequential, and actionable contributions to the theory, practice, and evaluation of development. 7
1. Measuring Development: Well-Being as Cultural and Social, Not Just Material
Measures of material well-being – such as income, consumption, income inequality, education, and
infrastructure – dominate how we assess development. Such measures have their place, of course, but
they exclude social and cultural aspects of the good life that are also important, such as spiritual and
religious well-being, social connectedness, and cultural affinity. Many of these cannot be easily
‘counted’ (and thus become formally recognized as legitimate). Subjective welfare analysis and
“happiness studies” have helped somewhat in this regard (with Bhutan even basing its entire
development strategy around enhancing ‘happiness,’ not ‘growth’ 8), but they are subject to various
weaknesses in interpretation and analysis. New developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Large Language Models (LLMs), and the analysis of narratives and open-ended interviews that they
make possible at scale, may improve the tracking and salience of non-material aspects of well-being and
broaden our understanding of development and its associated policies (e.g. Ashwin et al. 2022).
2. Outcomes versus Processes
Outcomes dominate the development discourse: randomized controlled trials (RCTs), for instance, are
entirely focused on measuring the causal links between interventions and outcomes. The Sustainable
Development Goals track outcomes that are considered important by the international community.
Consequently, development focuses on what we may call “outcome policies” which operate by
manipulating the levers of government – taxes, expenditures, regulations – to achieve these outcomes,
and thus the success of these policies is judged by measurable improvements in those outcomes. But the
specific mechanisms and associated legitimacy of processes that yield development outcomes (both
positive and negative) are less emphasized (Barron et al., forthcoming). This means that the details
surrounding the granular processes by which an idea turns into a complicated sequence of actions to
produce an outcome are ignored; this also makes policy less effective and potentially less equitable.
A process-focused policy attempts to shift the trajectory of change (Rao 2019). Its effects can be
more difficult to measure because its proximate impact is often subtle. It focuses on equalizing power
relationships by shifting the process of decision-making in favor of the less privileged, and on the
incremental change of one step building on the last. The full impact of a process-policy generally takes a
much longer time to reveal itself but can be longer-lasting because it reduces the inequalities and
6
On social relations as “the missing link” in development, see Grootaert (1997); as the key to “making democracy
work”, see Putnam (1993); and for the early empirical studies demonstrating positive effects on development
outcomes, see Knack and Keefer (1997) (macro) and Narayan and Pritchett (1999) (micro).
7
See Kabeer (2015) for a different reading of the history of “the social” aspects of development. The 10 issues we
have identified are broadly consistent with those of Michael Cernea, the ‘founding father’ of social
development at the World Bank (see Koch-Weser and Guggenheim 2021).
8
See (2022) provides a compelling argument for the limits of the Bhutan model.
3
imperfections in how decisions are made. Examples include systems of deliberative decision-making that
have constitutional sanction, political reservations for discriminated minorities and women, and adaptive
systems of project implementation.
3. Reflexive Approaches to Knowledge
Those who conduct research on topics such as development, poverty, or discrimination study people
who are almost always at a considerable economic, social, and cultural distance from them. This raises
the important question of “Whose Reality Counts?” (Chambers 1997). Do we focus on trying to meet the
current standards of rigor of our disciplines, satisfying our peer researchers, and ensuring our objectivity
by maintaining an arms-length distance from those whom we research? Or is it imperative upon us to
minimize the gap by discovering questions that closely reflect the interests and perspectives of our
research subjects via a process of dialogue, and use methods and modes of enquiry that as closely as
possible reflect their lived reality?
Burawoy (1998) argues that research of the first kind is positivist, where objectivity and
detachment are the organizing principle, and the second is reflexive, where engagement, not
detachment, is the primary organizing force. He further argues that “reflexive science” and “positive
science” represent entirely different approaches to social science and live in separate spheres. Rao
(2023) instead argues that there is a middle path between Burawoy’s sharp divide between positive and
reflexive science. While economics is still a long way away from becoming a predominantly reflexive
social science, there are four ways in which it can move toward greater reflexivity. All of them could be
helped by deploying a judicious mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, which can facilitate (a)
greater cognitive empathy, (b) the incorporation of qualitative and narrative information explicitly into
our analytical toolkit, (c) a focus on understanding processes as well as outcomes, and (d) efforts toward
greater participation of communities in our research.
4. Participation, Deliberation and Accountability
Policy is not just something you do to people; it is also done by people. A social approach to policy
making would try to effectively bring people in, not just because it is a defining feature of open
democratic procedures (linked to legitimacy concerns as noted above) but because it is the optimal
strategy for resolving many (most) complex social and political issues; such challenges do not have a
single technical ‘fix’ awaiting ‘experts’ to find or prioritize them, but require spaces to be created and
protected for hard conversations to be had, for potentially harsh trade-offs to be acknowledged and
navigated, and for some broadly legitimate form of solution/resolution to emerge from them.
Moreover, many procedures, policies, and practices do not work for everyone; they can be
deployed to enhance private rather than public welfare, or to discriminate against targeted groups.
Beyond formal rules and formal legal structures, much of everyday life – from routine business
transactions to upholding elections – is mediated by social norms. Together, these mechanisms enable
dissent to be aired in constructive ways and constitute a key means by which those in positions of power
are held accountable for their actions.
Setting up effective systems of participation, deliberation, and accountability is challenging and
benefits from scaling up organically from pre-existing systems that have emerged within the context,
rather than inducing participation from the outside (Mansuri and Rao 2012). When done correctly,
however, it can have enormous value in at least the following ways:
4
• Filling in the blank spaces between elections by fostering continuous dialogue between citizens and
governments. This requires the creation of systems of deliberative decision-making. The “system”
usually has some kind of officially sanctioned civic space – e.g., a forum or a regularly scheduled
public meeting – where the average citizen is given a chance to influence directly public decisions
that have a bearing on their lives. But forums alone are not enough; they need to be embedded
within a culture of dialogue, debate, and discussion in which the goal is to make the act of speaking
and listening an everyday practice (Heller and Rao 2015).
• Equalizing power in decision-making by giving voice to disadvantaged groups and, more radically, by
reserving a percentage of seats in legislatures for representatives from such groups.
• Creating feedback loops within governments, and between governments and citizens, in which
decision-making becomes adaptive and incremental. This helps governments deliver better public
services and respond to the needs of citizens (World Bank 2004).
5. Social Capital and Capacities for Collective Action
Creating the capacity for collective action, or social capital, is a major challenge in development,
especially since development itself can disrupt the nature and extent of prevailing social structures, for
better and for worse. Understanding how communities work – why some are able to coordinate their
activities more effectively than others, and why the design and implementation of certain policy or
programmatic interventions can unlock the potential of collective action – is central to doing
development (Woolcock 1998). Yet, despite important work done in anthropology, economics, and
related disciplines on collective action and social networks (Dasgupta 2000; Ostrom 1990, 2009; Jackson
2008), the results of efforts to design, implement, and evaluate projects attempting to build social
capital at scale have yielded widely variable outcomes (Mansuri and Rao 2012). This is largely because
the design of such projects, and inferences drawn from orthodox evaluations of them, are rarely
informed by social and political theory, and because such theory would strongly suggest that projects
‘inducing’ what participants experience as novel forms of social interaction are inherently likely to
generate “mixed” outcomes (Woolcock 2019), and as such turn decisively on the quality of facilitation
(Rao et al. 2017).
From a narrow development perspective, social capital and collective action are best mobilized
not as ends in themselves but as a means to attaining public goods, enhancing the quality and
accessibility of basic public services, and protecting open spaces for deliberation and conflict resolution
(Gibson and Woolcock 2008). 9 The successful projects that have attempted to mobilize and build social
capital at scale have been deeply informed by reflexive empirical work (e.g., Guggenheim 2006 2021),
but they remain the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the design of such projects is
based on models deemed to be successful elsewhere (thus shortchanging the important steps needed to
secure local legitimacy). Their impact evaluations tend not to account for the fact that successful social
interventions at scale require communities to learn from each other (via spillovers between
communities), and need to accommodate detailed contextual idiosyncrasies in different communities
with attentive facilitation (leading to variations in intervention outcomes). All of this makes them
difficult to evaluate in general, and with RCTs in particular (Rao 2020). Building the capacity for collective
action requires a different, more embedded, long-term, iterative and interactive approach to design,
implementation, evaluation, and learning – practices that, alas, are rarely given the necessary level of
attention (Mansuri and Rao 2012, Barron et al. 2024).
9
Social capital can also, of course, be curated for important intrinsic reasons.
5
6. Undersides of Successful Development
Economic growth is essential to improving material well-being, but attaining it could also have an
underside (Asadullah et al., forthcoming). Depending on how rising incomes are distributed across
groups, high levels of inequality could reduce social cohesion, resulting in a sharp increase in material
desires that goes beyond gains in income – thereby resulting in increased indebtedness, rising stress as
people need to work harder and longer to meet those material expectations and outsource caring for
children and elders. It can also lead to a lack of respect for illiterate elders (and the decisions they
make), the transition from bartering to monetized exchange for everyday necessities, adherence to rigid
work schedules, ‘outsourcing’ elder care (because of fewer children being born, and fewer still, once
educated, willing to stay in their village of origin to attend to parents in their sunset years).
Similarly, raising productivity means, by definition, fewer workers are needed to produce the
same outcomes, leading in agriculture to mass migrations from an array of small rural villages to large
urban settlements as farming becomes mechanized, with the likely ensuing loss of community, culture,
and connectedness. This phenomenon – urbanization increasing with national wealth – is not only
among the most robust empirical relationships in development; versions of it, along with the
unwelcome social consequences (loneliness, addiction, alienation), are also manifest in high-income
countries, as the influential work of Case and Deaton (2021) on “deaths of despair” in the United States
has amply demonstrated.
7. Social Embeddedness
Markets are not disembodied, self-contained realms of action but distinctly human inventions (‘social
constructions’) – they are products of laws, rules, and norms grounded in consent and enforceability.
They are consequently deeply embedded within social and political relations. Polanyi (1944) argues that
a self-regulating free market, as envisioned by liberal economists, is an unachievable utopia and that
“such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human…substance of
society.” Thus, the pursuit of economic growth at all costs, by unfettering the economy from regulations
and government control, dis-embeds individuals and families from protective, reciprocal, social
institutions and places them at the mercy of anonymous markets controlled by wealthy, politically
powerful interests which can create dissatisfaction and social disorder.
8. Social Limits to Growth
Fred Hirsch (1976) has argued that growth has “social limits.” This is because “...the satisfaction that
individuals derive from goods and services depends in increasing measure not only on their own
consumption but on consumption by others as well.” This results in increased competition for “positional
goods” where your well-being “depends on an increased extent on your relative position in the
economic hierarchy,” which creates a “paradox of affluence” where most people feel much worse off
even though they may be materially better off. This creates “social scarcity” and an increased
privatization of public goods. This results in a loss in well-being; “...the frustration in affluence results
from its very success in satisfying previously dominant material needs.” Hirsch’s ideas have been
relatively neglected in development thinking but help us better understand why some high-growth
countries may also have widespread dissatisfaction (e.g. Asadullah et al., forthcoming) and get caught in
a “middle-income trap” (World Bank 2024).
6
9. Understanding History, Time, Impact Trajectories
Social change processes can evolve/unfold in highly non-linear and non-uniform ways for different
groups in different contexts at different scales of operation, thereby complicating inferences drawn
from impact (and other) evaluations only collecting ‘baseline’ and ‘follow-up’ data, and inferring
conclusions and ‘policy implications’ in the absence of a program- and context-specific ‘theory of
change’ (i.e., what outcomes it is reasonable to expect by when and by whom) (Woolcock 2022).
Precisely because ‘development’ in some form has transpired across the entire existence of homo
sapiens’ existence (some 200,000 years), history – both ‘the discipline’ and ‘the past’ – constitutes a vast
reservoir of distinctive (and potentially actionable) knowledge (Bayly et al. 2011). Put differently, ‘the
past’ is not only apprehendable on topics for which we happen to have time-series data.
10. Taking Context (and Culture) Seriously
‘Context’ is not just “out there,” a singularity waiting for a certain scholarly group’s understanding of
what counts as independent “rigorous research” to discern what it is and means; development agencies
and actors – along with the tools they wield, the resources they bring, and the assumptions on which
they justify their actions – are themselves a manifestation of contexts, ones that are often utterly alien
(even orthogonal) to those with whom they are interacting. Creating and protecting space (regarded as
legitimate by both parties) to jointly navigate and negotiate such differences is rarely a priority in
development practice. Effective development requires an understanding of culture as a malleable,
dynamic, relational process which is deeply embedded within a society’s social and political context (Rao
and Walton 2004). Taking this seriously would need a development apparatus that is less focused on
moving money from donors to beneficiaries to one is that is led organically – both in design and
implementation – by those who are most affected by the intervention.
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