An analysis of Botswana’s implementation challenges

Abstract

While politicians, academics and development practitioners agreethat Botswana faces the challenge of poor project implementation, noresearch has been conducted to understand the causes of this problem.Our objective in this paper is to examine factors that contribute topoor project implementation in Botswana. To achieve this objective, wereview the literature on the causes and effects of poor implementation.Thereafter, we assess a number of major implementation failures inBotswana to determine their causes. We argue that these challenges donot to fit perfectly with the traditional ‘implementation literature’ whichattributes poor implementation to whether public policies followeda ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’ model, or whether they were a ‘hybrid’that combines the two. We conclude that in Botswana, the complexityof policy challenges, the supply driven nature of implementation, thedeclining policy commitment and the reluctance to reform are the mainchallenges to implementation.