When Good Policies Go Bad, Then What? Dislodging Exhausted Industrial and Education Policies in Latin America

Abstract

Successful policies, those that ‘have endured, met their aims and secured the acquiescence of those who initially opposed them,’ sometimes succeed by adapting to new circumstances and realities, as Willy McCourt and Tony Bebbington point out in Chapter 1. Creative adjustment may therefore be one way that such policies endure over time and continue to provide benefits to significant sectors of a population. Sometimes, however, for development and poverty alleviation to continue in the wake of a successful policy, it may be necessary for the original policy to be superseded by a significantly different one. Indeed, policies that produce good results may, over time, cease to do so. Moreover, successful policies can create unintended negative consequences that need to be addressed through new policy initiatives. Thus, over the course of time, even policies that have strong records of generating growth and poverty reduction may need to be revised in significant ways or replaced by new policies that are more appropriate.