Based on world Bank and other donoer experience, the paper looks at progress in and obstacles to developing strategies for judicial assistance programs which build on broadly shared experience, theory, and empirical evidence and research. While limited to judicial reform the autjor suspects some of the same problems may arise in other public sector instituional building efforts. The central question is why, after nearly twenty years of concerted efforts with these programs, the dominant approach continues to emphasize a collection of building blocks (the growing list of common components of activities) with notably few advances in defining strategies (agreed upon objectives, causal linkages, sequencing and coordiantion of inputs, indicators of success, standards for impact evaluation, etc.) and what can be done to remedy this situation. This is essentially an institutional analysis of institutional development assistance and as such reviews some of the following as contributing factors and explores the impact of each on the design and implementation of reform programs: historical origins and evolution of the programs and mixed motives behind them; lack of an adequate knowledge base on sector operations or on their real impact on extra-sectoral behavior; the local and external participants' lack of experience in sector reforms; changing political reoles and importance of courts; disciplinary biases; ease of entry eand the expanding range of participants; academic-practitioner divergences of interest and the weak role of research ; factors impeding broadly based review and evaluation of results. There are currently some hopeful signs of an emerging interest in moving beyond the current situation, although so far the demand is voiced by a minority of participants. Thus the last section develops a short proposal for building on these developments and for accelerating the creation of a discipline of judicial reform policy