Chris Blattman: "Development must be seized, through struggle. It cannot be given."

Great quote. Blattman also quotes Owen Barder:

Too often we think of scaling up in development like rolling a new product line across an existing series of shops. That’s the wrong model. Scaling up in development is more like building a series of separate businesses from scratch, each in a different market.

…Instead of thinking that creating capable organisations will deliver results effectively, perhaps successful organisations are the consequence, not the cause, of success. Capability in formal organisations is what happens when successful folk practices, which evolve out of years of struggle and adaptation, are consolidated into formal processes.