Reform fatigue and how it is overcome

Having watched reforms here for two decades, the interesting question is not which were announced but which survived. The pattern is fairly consistent and it is not about the quality of the drafting.

What makes a reform stick

A constituency that benefits and notices. Open procurement has thousands of suppliers who can now bid; removing it would produce immediate, organised objection from people with nothing to hide.

Visibility. A change people can see and use every week is harder to reverse than one that operates inside an institution.

Reversal cost. Once data is public, unpublishing it is a conspicuous act requiring an explanation nobody wants to give. Reforms that publish are unusually durable for this reason alone.

And an external anchor: a commitment recorded in an agreement, monitored and reported on, so that reversal has a diplomatic price.

What makes a reform reverse

Depending on a single person. When an institution's independence rests on who leads it rather than on the procedure for appointing them, it lasts as long as that appointment.

Being invisible to the public, so nobody notices the quiet amendment.

And imposing concentrated costs on an organised group while spreading the benefit thinly, which is the classic recipe for a reform being fought and eventually undone.

The design lesson

Build reforms that publish, that create beneficiaries who can defend them, and that do not depend on the person currently in the chair. Everything else is a matter of timing.

What the reforms that held have in common is that they left a record and that the record is used — undoing them would first require the users to give it up. The ones that reversed were always of the same kind: those resting on the good intentions of a single institution. The design lesson is that what makes a reform permanent is not its penalty but the number of parties that have come to depend on it.