There are better practices to ‘best practices’.

Interpreting the Topic

The quotation marks around 'best practices' are the essay's key: it questions the managerial cult of the single proven template. 'Best' freezes yesterday's solution as today's ceiling and ignores context; 'better' is a direction — iterative, local, always improvable. The essay must argue that governance and development advance through continuous, context-sensitive learning rather than imported perfection.

Dimensions to Develop

• The seduction of best practice: benchmarking promises certainty and borrowed legitimacy — but institutions can mimic the form of success without its function, what development scholars call isomorphic mimicry.
• Transplant failures: education, sanitation and policing templates copied across contexts underperform because geography, administrative capacity and culture differ; the same uniform fits no one.
• Better practice as process: kaizen-style continuous improvement, pilots before scale, problem-driven iteration — measure, adapt, repeat; evaluation over imitation.
• Indian evidence of leapfrogging: UPI bypassed the card-based 'best practice' of the West to build a superior public payments rail; Aadhaar-enabled DBT, Kudumbashree's SHG architecture and mohalla clinics are home-grown betters now studied globally.
• Institutionalising learning: the Aspirational Districts Programme replaced templates with ranked, district-specific improvement; states as laboratories of federalism generate a portfolio of experiments rather than one national orthodoxy.

Quotes and Anchors

• Voltaire: 'The best is the enemy of the good.'
• Deming's discipline: decide on data, improve without end.

Closing Synthesis

Conclude that excellence is a verb, not a certificate. The question that matures governance is not 'what is the best practice elsewhere?' but 'what works here, and how do we make it work better next year?' Societies that institutionalise that question out-learn — and therefore out-govern — societies that laminate their answers.