In 2019, amid record high levels of political polarization, the US House of Representatives established a Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. The committee’s goal was to “make Congress work better for the American people,” and from the beginning, the chair, Rep. Derek Kilmer, a Democrat from Washington state, was determined to do so in a bipartisan manner. Kilmer and his fellow committee members faced a number of challenges. Some of the challenges were expected, such as figuring out how to do the committee’s work and build consensus. Some were unexpected, such as a global pandemic that kept committee members physically apart and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which strained relationships among committee members. The committee wrapped up its work after four years. It accomplished some modest structural and operational reforms, but perhaps more important, it built strong bipartisan relationships among its members and modeled a way of working together in Congress across differences.

Martha Coven and Elliot Mamet drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in July, August, and September 2024. Case published November 2024

In Colorado, as in most US states, politicians long controlled the process of drawing federal- and state-level legislative districts and manipulated district boundaries to secure political advantage. Dismayed by the tug-of-war that the process unleashed during the 2001 and 2011 redistricting cycles, in March 2015 a bipartisan group of former legislators assembled a coalition to promote adoption of an independent citizen redistricting commission. The coalition could pursue two routes to enactment: either it could get its proposal onto the ballot through Colorado’s citizen initiative process, or it could try to win support in both chambers of the state legislature. Both routes were difficult, and success depended on offering a model that would appeal to political heavyweights, advocacy groups, both major parties, and a growing contingent of politically independent voters. The Democratic Party was all but certain to control the next redistricting process, and it would not give up that advantage without a fight. To succeed, Fair Districts Colorado would have to cooperate and compromise with the party’s progressive wing. After collaborating with progressives to create a shared proposal and after launching a statewide communications campaign, well-connected coalition members were able to convince all members of both of the legislative chambers to put two constitutional amendments for an independent redistricting process in front of voters, who approved them in a landslide in 2018. In 2021, the inaugural Colorado Independent Congressional and Legislative Redistricting Commissions convened and created maps that scored well on metrics of competitiveness and representation despite having to work under challenging time constraints as well as pandemic-related logistical complications.

Alexander Vanderklipp drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Colorado from January to April 2024.

When partisan conflict tore apart the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, economist Salam Fayyad suddenly found himself in the role of prime minister—responsible for security, for basic service delivery, and for recharting Palestine’s path to statehood. Few wanted to serve in the emergency cabinet the president had asked him to form, so great seemed the risk of failure. The cabinet faced competing claims to legitimacy from Hamas, which headed the unity government that had just collapsed. The Basic Law, the territories’ constitution, included specific provisions that both provided clear guidance on how to move forward under the unforeseen conditions and contained enough ambiguity that allowed government legitimacy to be politically contested. As the internationally recognized prime minister, Fayyad persuaded a diverse group of independents and technocrats to accept ministerial posts in the emergency government. To support decision-making and implementation at the center of government, he tasked a close adviser with setting up a prime minister’s office; strengthened the role of the cabinet secretariat; established systems for paying civil servants, including those in Gaza, where his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, continued to assert authority; worked with international partners to help meet basic citizen needs in the territory the government could not easily reach; and strengthened communications and transparency. Those steps enabled the cabinet to work more effectively and helped support urgent efforts to restore order, expand economic opportunities, and, ultimately, embark on a more ambitious political agenda toward independent Palestinian statehood.

Henrietta Toivanen, Jennifer Widner, and Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted by Tristan Dreisbach in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and by Dreisbach and others in additional locations during 2019 and 2020. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published April 2024.

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, it devastated the island’s already fragile infrastructure. The power grid, old and poorly maintained, collapsed. Communications systems, the water supply, and many roads, schools, and homes also suffered severe damage. The estimated cost of repair was US$98 billion. To coordinate effective recovery and reconstruction efforts and manage federal funding, the Puerto Rican government established a central agency, the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, later known as COR3. Reconstruction got off to a slow start because of limited capacity, fiscal austerity, and US federal government procedures that assumed local financial liquidity and the ability to come to rapid agreement on the estimated costs of proposed projects. Gradually, as levels of trust between levels of government grew, procedural innovation enabled funds to flow to municipalities and other recipients, which then contracted for repair or rebuilding under COR3’s supervision. By late 2023, six years into the reconstruction effort, roughly 10,600 projects were in progress and Puerto Rico had spent $1.8 billion of the US$23.4 billion the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had awarded. US$11.3 billion awaited FEMA approval before expenditure could begin. Separately, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development had committed over $20 billion in disaster recovery and mitigation grants and disbursed about a quarter of that amount. The first five years of the recovery, 2018-2023 offered important lessons about ways to balance speed, quality, cost, integrity, equity, and alignment with strategic priorities during major postdisaster reconstruction.

Kate Johnston drafted this case study based on interviews conducted with government officials and civic leaders in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., from July through October 2023.  Matthew Lillehaugen and Alina Dunlap contributed to the research. Alina Dunlap authored the addendum. Case published March 2024.

News of the outbreak of an unknown virus in Wuhan, China, quickly caught the attention of South African disease experts in December 2019. In the event the virus spread globally, those experts understood that the South African government would find itself face to face with two persistent challenges. First, although an upper-middle-income country, South Africa was also the world’s most unequal. Within the country, household access to health care varied dramatically, as did the vulnerability of livelihoods to economic shocks. Second, there were wide disparities in the levels of readiness across the provinces, districts, and cities that would manage the front lines of any response. During mid-March 2020, as the first South African residents fell ill, the government set up a structure for making policy decisions. It vested responsibility for pandemic response coordination in the security services, implemented stringent restrictions on movement, and used the country’s natural disaster management system to try to align policy with the provinces. The Department of Health, already focused on disease surveillance, testing, and other technical functions, cochaired many of the work streams in those institutions. Nonetheless, during the first wave, poorer provinces and districts struggled to respond effectively, and the national government—with external help—surged assistance to those areas. The investment helped contain the spread of infection and return the country to lower alert levels, but disparities in capacity, illness, and deaths persisted in subsequent waves. The country continued to adapt and performed better on several metrics than did a number of similarly situated counterparts. However, the experience pinpointed the difficulties of boosting local preparedness and addressing underlying inequalities amid a crisis.

Jennifer Widner and Andile Cele drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in South Africa during 2021. Tyler McBrien assisted with some of the background research. Case published March 2024.

In the wake of a 2001 scandal over the use of government employees to assist political campaigns, public interest groups in the US state of Wisconsin pushed for reform of the state ethics and elections boards, which had been slow to respond to complaints about misuse of resources and had declined to refer suspected lawbreakers for prosecution. During the 2002 election period, gubernatorial candidates of both main parties joined the call to insulate election administration from partisan pressure. Five years of negotiation came to fruition in 2007, when the state senate and assembly voted to create a consolidated election and ethics agency directed by retired judges. The first nonpartisan election administration authority of its type in the United States, the new agency, called the Government Accountability Board, replaced a system that had vested governance of elections in a commission made up of members of both major parties. But eight years later, political alignments shifted. Arguing that the board had overreached in its handling of certain sensitive cases, state legislators in 2015 voted to shutter the institution and reverted to the pre-2007 system run by representatives of the two major political parties. This case illuminates both the circumstances that can drive politicians to introduce a nonpartisan election management system and the challenges associated with the design, implementation, and sustainability of the approach. (Note that the lead reformer in this case, Michael G. Ellis, died in 2018.)  

Daniel Dennehy and staff drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the United States from August through November 2022. Case published February 2023.

After a hack-and-leak operation that targeted a candidate in its 2017 presidential election and a social media campaign against its exports in 2020, France’s government decided to take steps to protect its politics from foreign digital interference. With another national election approaching in April 2022, Lieutenant Colonel Marc-Antoine Brillant began designing a new unit that aimed to detect foreign information manipulation while preserving freedom of speech by separating responsibility for identification of attacks from responsibility for framing and executing a response. After the proposal cleared legal hurdles, Brillant’s team, under the authority of the Secretariat-General for National Defense and Security, set up an interagency governance system, initiated a dialogue with social media platforms, and monitored social media to detect hostile campaigns. During the 2022 campaign, the unit, called Viginum, identified five foreign interference attempts and referred them to other parts of government that could decide whether and how to react. The elections ran smoothly, and the Viginum team started to focus on building stronger public understanding of its mission and activities.  

Alexis Bernigaud drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in France from August through November 2022. Case published January 2023.

In 2017, Cape Town, South Africa, was on a countdown to disaster. An unprecedented and wholly unforeseen third consecutive year of drought threatened to cut off water to the city’s four million citizens. Faced with the prospect of running dangerously low on potable water, local officials raced against time to avert “Day Zero”—the date on which they would have to shut off drinking water to most businesses and homes in the city. Cape Town’s government responded effectively to the fast-worsening and potentially cataclysmic situation. Key to the effort was a broad, multipronged information campaign that overcame skepticism and enlisted the support of a socially and economically diverse citizenry as well as private companies. Combined with other measures such as improving data management and upgrading technology, the strategy averted disaster. By the time the drought eased in 2018, Capetonians had cut their water usage by nearly 60% from 2015 levels. With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town achieved one of the lowest per capita water consumption rates of any major city in the world. The success set a benchmark for cities around the world that confront the uncertainties of a shifting global climate.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2018. Case published February 2019.

Upon assuming office in mid-2007, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad faced an economy in shambles. Devastated by a loss of revenues and international aid in the wake of Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, which brought to power politicians deemed terrorists by some in the international community, average real gross domestic product per capita in the West Bank and Gaza was about 40% below its 1999 level, and the government was broke. To restart the economy and demonstrate that the Palestinian Authority could manage a socioeconomic crisis in a manner befitting a sovereign state, Fayyad and his colleagues created a detailed development plan that helped secure financial resources from international donors. With that money, the government undertook an ambitious community development program, building thousands of small-scale infrastructure projects across the West Bank. It also negotiated an easing of some of the Israeli-imposed movement restrictions that were stifling both commerce and investment. The West Bank then posted two years of double-digit economic growth and expanded, private-sector activity, but the occupation’s political challenges stymied the Fayyad government’s ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood. 

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 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.