Among development economists of the postwar decades, two contrasting styles of policy design held sway. The first, which its critics later named the convening style, placed its faith in expert deliberation. Its practitioners, of whom Adeyemi is the best remembered, believed that the right policy could be reasoned out in advance by assembling specialists who understood a country's structure, and that careful planning on paper would translate into results in the field. Pilot trials, on this view, were a needless delay before the obvious.
By the 1990s a rival style, the evidential, had displaced much of the convening tradition's authority. Its advocates insisted that no amount of expert deliberation could substitute for measuring what a policy actually did once enacted, ideally by comparing communities that received an intervention with otherwise similar communities that did not. Where the convening style trusted the reasoning of the planners, the evidential style trusted only the record of outcomes, and it treated a well-argued plan that had never been tested as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
Yet the evidential style carried a cost that its early champions were slow to acknowledge. A finding that an intervention worked in the communities studied did not guarantee that it would work elsewhere, since the conditions that made it succeed might be local. The convening tradition, for all its overconfidence, had at least aimed at general principles. Some later writers therefore argued that the two styles were not rivals to be ranked but partial answers to different questions, one asking what is true here and now, the other asking what holds across many places, and that a mature practice would need both.
According to the passage, the convening style and the evidential style differed most fundamentally in their views about
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