The question running through all of it

Two research papers, a coloring book, a card game, and five summers of teaching keep circling the same thing: the gap between what institutions say they do for people and what they actually deliver. Thailand guarantees every child fifteen years of free schooling — and more than half of the 300,000–500,000 migrant children in the country are out of school. Vietnam has decentralized governance and formal citizen-participation mechanisms — and measured accountability has no detectable effect on forest protection once you control for national time trends. In both cases, the rights and the mechanisms exist. The infrastructure that makes them real doesn't. That's the problem the products and the research are each trying to work on, from different angles.