Abstract:
What drives policy reform after long periods of policy inertia? What factors shape the effectiveness of
policy implementation following reform decisions? These questions increasingly concern the international
donor and research communities, given the importance of policy environments in shaping development
outcomes and the growing need to achieve development impact with scarce resources. To
address these questions, this paper introduces the Kaleidoscope Model of policy change. Inductively
derived from empirical examples in developing countries, political economy literature, and theoretical
scholarship on the policy process, the model proposes a set of 16 operational hypotheses to identify
the conditions under which policies emerge on the agenda and ultimately are implemented. The paper
tests the model empirically in Zambia by evaluating eight policy reform episodes related to agricultural
input subsidies and vitamin A fortification. Empirical application and hypothesis testing rely on rigorous
process tracing using secondary sources and semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 58
stakeholders in Zambia. In the policy reforms studied, a majority of the KM’s core variables proved robust
across the two distinct policy domains, while a handful emerged as relevant only episodically. In an era of
growing pressure on donor resources and government budgets, the Kaleidoscope Model offers a practical
framework through which practitioners and researchers can assess when and where investments in
policy reforms are most feasible given a country’s underlying political, economic, and institutional
characteristics.