Peter Houtzager and Lucie E. White the Long Arc of Pragmatic ESR Advocacy 173 healthcare, housing, jobs, and the like to impoverished people, on the ground. Thus, ESR advocates must do more than close the gap between the “law on the books” and its implementation. 8 More importantly, they must help reorient key practices of social welfare agencies and other national institutions so that they do a better job of delivering on the promises that ESR entitlements guarantee. Beyond that, ESR advocates must write those innovations back into the law and then embed these legally mandated innovations into the responsible public agencies’ practices over the long term. 9 Thus, in the case of Mohammed Zakari in Ghana, which we set out in Chapter 4, the challenge for the ESR advocates was to translate their advocacy campaign into a reorientation of the government’s healthcare delivery system for the poor. Next, they had to write the resulting changes into the law. Then they had to embed these changes into the Ministry of Health’s everyday institutional practices, so that its agents changed how they conducted admission and discharge in hospitals and clinics across the nation. Building on Chapter 5 and the case studies in this volume, this concluding chapter looks at the hard work these advocates faced in helping to make real change. Its goal is to open a conversation about the path between creative ESR advocacy, as it takes place in contemporary Africa, and structural change that can reduce systemic and sustained ESR deprivation. To guide our discussion of this path we present an “arc” that traces how creative African ESR advocates use law and other tactics to produce innovations in the creation and delivery of ESR guaranteed public goods, innovations that they then seek to embed in the practices of public agencies across large classes of people, over the long run. The arc is a heuristic device rather than a theory or a recipe for successful advocacy, and is offered to spark discussion among scholars, activists, claimants, and others rather than to tell them what to do. As we describe more fully below (in the discussion accompanying Figure 1), the arc traces ESR advocacy as it moves across a series of interconnected temporal fields. Thus, it runs from (1) local “generative spaces” to (2) pressure on national political institutions to change their ESR-relevant practices to (3) actual changes in the practices of government agencies to (4) the spread of those changes into multiple local settings. 10 Social activation within and across those local spaces pushes them toward becoming new generative spaces, which can both sustain the previously implemented institutional changes and promote improved innovation.