Confronting the Informal in Good Governance: The Case of Decentralised Education-System Reform in Guinea

type="main"> <p>For twenty years, technocratic planning and management approaches have dominated good-governance reforms in developing countries. This is true even for newer ‘participatory’ and ‘citizen-driven’ reforms that still struggle to engage with powerful informal forces affecting public service delivery. This article presents evidence from a case study of decentralised education-system reform in Guinea, revealing a wide range of influential dynamics outside the technical realm. These corroborate the argument for ‘good-fit’ alternatives to traditional governance approaches and concrete measures to better capture the constructive and disable the destructive effects of informality on development.