The elephant in the room: politics and the development problem (original) (raw)

The Politics of Bilateral Donor Assistance

2008

Motivated by the Millennium Development Goals and international campaigns aiming to ‘end poverty’, bilateral donors have in recent years made numerous commitments to substantially increase their foreign aid budgets. This paper looks at the role that bilateral aid plays in influencing the policy making processes of developing countries in the context of this surge. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore patterns of aid allocation, both across countries and sectors, and examines the dynamics of aid relationships in three case study countries in order to shed light on the mechanisms used by donors to promote their development agendas. The paper concludes that bilateral donors do have significant influence in the policy making processes of the recipients of their aid. While recent years have seen an increased focus on national ownership of policies by recipient governments, several studies have shown that in certain circumstances the aid modalities intended to promote this increase in ownership—such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and General Budget Support—have actually had the opposite effect and increased donor oversight of developing country processes. As such, developing countries are often constrained in their policy options. Quantitative analysis of the sectoral allocations of bilateral donors and case studies that look at donor-recipient relations in more detail, show that this influence has been used to shift emphasis away from investment in infrastructure and the productive sectors. This reflects the growing focus on social services and governance reform as means of achieving progress towards the MDGs. While these may in themselves be valuable investments, the paper highlights the danger of low investment in infrastructure, industry and agriculture—namely the inability to exploit synergies between social and economic policy, limiting social policy to a residual, protective role. In this context, allowing recipients greater ownership over their policies can become little more than a façade. Indeed, there is a clear contradiction between the donors’ focus on democratic good governance and their influence over sectoral priorities, which takes policy making power away from the government and accountability away from citizens. This highlights the disjuncture between the focus of donors on recipient ownership, and their continued mistrust of developing country administrative and policy making systems.

The Anti-politics of Development: Donor Agencies and the Political Economy of Governance

2012

This article discusses the attempt undertaken by several development aid agencies since the turn of the century to integrate political economy assessments into their decision making on development assistance. The article discusses three such attempts: the Drivers of Change adopted by the UK’s Department for International Development, the Strategic Governance and Corruption Analysis (SGACA) developed by the Dutch Directorate General for International Cooperation and the new thinking on political economy analysis, policy reform and political risk advanced by the World Bank. On the basis of a political-economic interpretation of development agencies, two main factors are found to hinder the successful application of political economy assessment. In the first place, the agencies’ professional outlook leads them to see development in primarily technical terms. In the second place, the nature of incentives for development professionals leads them to resist the implementation of political economy analyses.

From Recipients to Donors: Emerging Powers and the Changing Development Landscape

2012

Patrícia Magalhães Ferreira is currently a researcher at the Valle Flor Institute in Lisbon and has collaborated for more than a decade with the Institute for Strategic and International Studies. She has published on fragile states and development co-operation, EU-Africa issues and aid effectiveness. She has also worked as a consultant on development co-operation and evaluation in Africa.

The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid

2005

What's wrong with development aid? It is argued that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system, and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. The theoretical insights of the new institutional economics are applied to several settings. First, the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, is investigated to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, are used to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries might also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Suggestions are offered on how to improve aid's effectiveness. These include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation process of development assistance programs.