“Security was the toughest part of the job,” Salam Fayyad said, reflecting on his first two years as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. The second intifada, a five-year uprising against Israeli occupation, had just wound down, leaving in its wake an epidemic of crime and lawlessness in the West Bank. To restore order and to demonstrate that authority could fulfill this most primary function of a state, Fayyad worked with security chiefs to revive the mission of the Palestinian Security Services and enhance their professionalism, to deploy the civil police, and to get gunmen off the streets. Those steps required strategies for both introducing reform in opaque systems and persuading people that better policing was not tantamount to supporting an occupying state. By the end of 2007, six months after he assumed office, crime rates were down and public perceptions of safety had started to improve. Still, continued Israeli interference in the West Bank’s internal security plus other persistent challenges undermined efforts to maintain a functional and sovereign security apparatus.

Jennifer Widner, Tristan Dreisbach, and Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and in Princeton, New Jersey, and other locations during 2019 and 2020. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published June 2022.

Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health was struggling to meet its goals in 2014 despite impressive gains in the health of its citizens during the previous 20 years. A new minister and his leadership team reached out for ideas by engaging Ethiopia’s regions, districts, and communities—an essential step in a large and ethnically diverse society. They then developed an ambitious transformation program to help realize the government’s national aspirations for health care, including commitments made to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. To bring their vision to fruition, however, the minister and his team had to link priorities to the budget process and use the health budget as a management tool. The ministries of health and finance matched goals and targets to available resources and worked to create actionable plans. And health officials took steps to build cooperation and extend coordination at every level of government in Ethiopia’s federal system. Technical and capacity constraints—plus unexpected political upheaval beginning in late 2015—slowed implementation, but in 2018 a new administration was taking steps to address those challenges.

Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2018. Case published January 2019.

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When President Suharto's regime fell in 1998, reform leaders in Indonesia responded to public calls for democracy by implementing reforms in the structure of government, decentralizing authority to the country's districts.  This transformation altered the relationship between the Indonesian people and the state, granting greater autonomy to local leaders.  In theory, decentralizing to the district level would reduce demands for separatism in the provinces while strengthening the accountability of local governments to their constituents.  However, the new structures also risked empowering local politicians who might be inexperienced, corrupt or interested in secession, triggering the very disintegration of the country that the reformers sought to prevent.  This policy note outlines the ways in which Indonesia implemented sweeping reforms-consolidating regional and central government services and empowering local governments-while avoiding this governance trap.  It also traces the process by which the government incrementally revised the initial laws and policies as it encountered challenges. 

Richard Bennet drafted this case study with the help of Itumeleng Makgetla and Rohan Mukherjee on the basis of interviews conducted in Jakarta and Surakarta, Indonesia, during April and June 2010. 

Associated Interview(s):  Siti Nurbaya, Hadi Soesastro