Sujai Shivakumar

• Ph.D.
• Managing Director at The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Innovation - the process of transforming research ideas into marketable products and services - requires the collaboration of multiple actors across a variety of interactive situations. Increasingly, innovation is recognized as an important driver of economic growth and human development. Understanding the contexts within which these actors - inclu...

Flexible electronics describes circuits that can bend and stretch, enabling significant versatility in applications and the prospect of low-cost manufacturing processes. They represent an important technological advance, in terms of their performance characteristics and potential range of applications, ranging from medical care, packaging, lighting...

Successful development aid generates the appropriate incentives so that the time, skill, knowledge, and effort of multiple individuals create jointly valued outcomes. These incentives come from the institutions—the rules of the games of life and productive coexistence— that development aid helps to create or modify. As a society forms more robust n...

The modern analysis of constitutional choice, which began 50 years ago with the publication of The Calculus of Consent, is highly relevant in today’s world. In recent times, calls for crafting new constitutional arrangements have been heard in the wake of the Arab Spring and in formation of new countries like South Sudan. Constitutional reform is s...

Examining the foundations of development, Shivakumar describes how societies can reconstitute themselves to improve their developmental well-being. He argues that the unitary state focus in theory and practice limits the creative potential of individuals to improve their mutual well-being through crafting capabilities for self-governance. This is a...

Professor Wagner characterizes Vincent Ostrom's oeuvre as a meditation on Hamilton's question of “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice”. In this comment, I note that the themes in Professor Ostrom's work also respond to Alexis de Tocqueville's challenge to develop a “new scien...

What's wrong with development aid? It is argued that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system, and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. The the...

Development theory and aid practice in the postwar framework emphasizes the instrumental role of the state in transforming society. One implication of this emphasis is that when a state fails, the postwar development framework fails as well. Resuscitating the state is one way to save this framework. The Good Governance strategy, adopted by the Worl...

Development concerns the realization of our adaptive well-being through productive association with others. Institutions matter for development because they represent a shared understanding within a community of the rules we need to cooperate successfully with each other. Improving our adaptive potential requires that we recognize and renew these s...

In moving from theory to practice, where can we begin? Crafting capabilities for self-governance begins by acknowledging prevailing institutions that actually guide how individuals associate with each other in various local contexts.1 Even though these institutions, as inherited, may not be optimal solutions to current collective-action problems, t...

Democracy is increasingly seen as the reality characterizing human civilization. In forging a new democratic world for the twenty-first century, a new science of politics is necessary—one that draws on human capacities to craft the rules of self-governance through reflection and choice. Indeed, human beings possess the potential to improve their we...

Characteristics associated with advanced human development and rapid economic growth arise through the forms of productive association that human beings refer to (whether consciously or tacitly) in their actions and interactions with each other. How well individuals come together to solve problems—and in this way realize their innovative potential—...

As a system of organized exchange, the character of a given market reflects the rules that shape it. Abstract debate framed as to whether “the state” or “the market” is better in promoting development is therefore bound to miss the point. In the real world, the problem-solving potential of any market—and hence its capacity to facilitate development...

Pathologies identified with underdevelopment arise when existing weak or bad institutions fail to address recurrent localized problems of collective action. Development theory and aid practice in the western postwar tradition focus predominantly on the overall outcomes of these institutional failures, assigning to the state a central role in fixing...

Freedom, Amartya Sen (1999a) argues, is a means of realizing an improvement in the general welfare as well as a goal of economic and social life itself. Freedom is key if humans are to exercise their innovative potentials to realize and fulfill their sense of well-being. The way we constitute our relationships—through a focus on the rules of associ...

How do we bring constitutional governance to practice? In what ways can citizens exercise their creativity to better realize their own wellbeing along with that of others? What roles do civic entrepreneurs play in this regard, and what promotes and channels their endeavors? This chapter tries to answer these questions in setting out an institutiona...

Human beings continually adapt to their physical and social environment; problem-solving is a constant and core activity (Popper 2001). Every day, individuals encounter problems that they solve singly as well as jointly with others. In both cases, problem-solving proceeds within some explicit or implicit representation of the relevant situation. In...

"The failure of the State in Africa and elsewhere, and the conflict attendant to it, is rooted in the lack of correspondence between indigenous institutions and the formal structures of the State. Indigenous institutions, as have variously evolved, represent sets of practices and expectations that can be distinctive to problems of collective action...

Despite tremendous efforts and good intentions, aid often produces disappointing results. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), along with other bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, has indicated that the lack of proper incentives generated by aid itself may be an important factor in undermining its sustainability. Th...

"Recent debates over how to capture the value of various forms of social activity and common environmental resources call for a thorough examination of the concept of value itself. Of late, advocates for various social and environmental causes have remonstrated that since the value of productive work outside the market or of environmental resources...

"The past three decades have witnessed a revival of interest in the study of institutions by economists outside the disciplinary mainstream. Approaches in, what has become identified as, 'New Institutional Economics' promote an understanding of social institutions as a complex of rules which, because of their reliability, recognizability, and gener...

In November of 1999, ABB, a Swedish multinational corporation, completed a contract with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) to build and transfer converter sta- tions for a high voltage transmission line extending from a generating station in central India to Bombay on the west coast. SIDA, the Swedish International Development Agency,...

"There is no such thing as the market but rather nexus of exchange as circumscribed by certain rules. The patterns we observe as characteristics of varied markets are in turn dependant on the presence or absence of various static and dynamic rule properties. This basic insight of Constitutional Political Economy extends here to consider the market...

"Rapid political developments and technological change have, over the course of the past decade, changed the problem environment that large multilateral development agencies face in terms of serving the needs of the agents of their donor and recipient countries. These events have led to the recognition of the importance of the role of the State in...