The Foreign Service Journal, June 2006

lists. So the training workshop — rather than absorption of the workshop content — becomes the “result.” And, inevitably, the focus is on money — funding the work- shops, the vehicles, the per diems of workshop partici- pants, and so on. Though the word invariably figures in the project description, “sustainability” is not usually a result. What is needed now, instead, are more supple, longer-term efforts that are cargo-less, and where some of what is transferred has to be paid for. These efforts should have experts present who can become part of the system over the long term, not just for two, three or five years. The focus should be on the institutions that can enable growth: legal, judicial, financial, property regis- tration and other systems. Some of this type of work is going on today, but it has for the most part been stuffed into a “project” mold. We need efforts that are longer, more flexible and more process-oriented, and that can work with what is there, step by step, taking the time needed to bring about lasting results. Such approaches will not lend themselves to a quarter- by-quarter results framework matrix, so creative arrange- ments will be needed to replace a finite budget. One pos- sibility is to have USAID interventions in the institutional realm (whether in the form of loans or grants) indemni- fied or underwritten by private equity (a role, potentially, for some of the new philanthropy). Thus, even if public money ends up being difficult to account for over a long timeframe (say, 10 or more years), a fund would have been created and managed to pay back the Treasury. More conventionally, we could at least go back to basics: the building blocks of development — roads, edu- cation, health — and this time get it right by ensuring that the institutional context to support such building blocks is there or can be built alongside. How to ensure that context is another question. The answer is not to pay for the building to house the road maintenance organiza- tion and buy its equipment. The viability of the institu- tion is in its “software,” not its machines and bricks and mortar. To determine what that software is — how F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31