What follows is a discussion of two of the many challenges that often bedevil efforts to bring out pro-poor social and political change and an approach that is a way of dealing with them. You know the deal: well-meaning technocrats try to introduce a bit of governance reform...by stealth. Then it runs into trouble- usually due to vigorous attacks by vested interests likely to lose out if the reform succeeds - yet the potential beneficiaries are not organized, do not even know that they might benefit from the reform. And so the reformers are defeated. Or the reform, if it has already been introduced, is reversed or stalls. The problem is that many technical specialists are uncomfortable with the public sphere and all it entails: people, the media, controversy and debate, 'noise'. But unsupported reforms tend to become orphans and street urchins.
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We welcome our newest guest blogger, Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. 
Tom Jacobson, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Communications and Theater, Temple University. 
Caroline Jaine, 
