Category: Development

Book project: Why We Lie About Aid

Post author By Pablo
Post date 10 March 2016

(And The Messy Truth About Promoting Development)

It is now official: I am writing a book under contract with a publisher. Until the end of the year I will be posting updates and excerpts as I write it. But I can start today with the initial pitch:

Donor publics have been misled about the nature of development: for decades they have been told that it is about charity and technical fixes, when in fact it is as much about fights as our own policy-making is at home. Aid practitioners work in a world of struggles for reform, but they are forced to misrepresent and obfuscate the reality of development in order to comply with very restrictive and selective interpretations of principles like accountability, transparency, ownership or harmonisation. That is the dysfunctional aid system that we in donor countries have built, and then shackled with a discourse that mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation. A different approach is possible, and indeed has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world who provide political coverage for reformers or build coalitions that open up spaces for change. With real stories from aid practitioners in Britain, the US, Spain, Uganda, Honduras, Nigeria, Liberia, Rwanda and Ghana, this book explains what lies behind the much-criticized pathologies of aid, and challenges us to have a more honest conversation about development assistance.

Tags Actual development, Foreign aid, Publications, Silly debates

Development

Quantitative policy advice

Post author By Pablo
Post date 2 March 2016

Tags Dilbert, numbers

Development Social science

The concept with no discipline

Post author By Pablo
Post date 25 January 2016

Next week begins the first full master-level module that I am teaching at Manchester’s GDI: Policy Analysis. It is a bit of an experiment, intended to supplement the governance and politics stream with a more applied kind of course. Putting it together has been an interesting challenge, as I wanted to mix key ideas from policy sciences, political economy, organizational sociology and development studies. Despite this mad objective, I think the final result is a coherent course on the politics of the public policy process. But in putting this together I have started wondering again where it all went wrong for the study of the state and public administration.

Who are the key names in the literature about the politics of government? Max Weber was a lawyer, economist and historian who advanced sociology. Sammy Finer was a political scientist, expert on public administration and political historian. Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans – all of them sociologists who dabbled extensively in politics and history. Douglass North, economic historian and theorist who established the foundations for modern political economy. Robert Bates is a political scientist who also studied anthropology and economics. It’s as if you cannot belong to a single discipline if you want to advance the study of the state and public policy!

And yet, 21st-century academia almost guarantees that scholars be sequestered in their ever-shrinking silos. At Manchester, traditionally the study and teaching of development has been separate from politics, economics or sociology (they even belong to different schools!), and even within development politics and governance are confined to courses separate from economics and management. Then there’s me, putting together a course handbook spanning 4 or 5 disciplines. I must have been born 50 years too late!

Still, I am hopeful about our ability to integrate the politics of the state and public policy in the mainstream of development studies, which is after all a hybrid discipline. Perhaps in time I will find accomplices in development economics and development management who also feel a bit constrained by academic boundaries. In the meantime, I am sticking to my guns with Policy Analysis and the political study of the state, the concept with no discipline.

Speaking of sticking to one’s guns, I wonder what the man with no name would think about the concept with no discipline

Tags Boxes within boxes, Policy analysis, Public administration, Teaching, The state

Adaptive Development Africa Development Political Analysis

Article on public sector reform now available

Post author By Pablo
Post date 11 January 2016

Taylor & Francis has finally released online my Third World Quarterly piece with Badru Bukenya: ‘New’ approaches confront ‘old’ challenges in African public sector reform. It has been a lengthy process between TWQ and T&F, but we are finally there. Here’s the abstract:

The disappointing performance of conventional public sector reforms in developing countries has led to the rise of ‘new’ approaches seeking to overcome traditional bureaucratic barriers to change: leadership-focused interventions like the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI); accountability-focused initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP); and adaptation-focused models like those of Africa Power and Politics (APP). While these approaches are appealing to aid donors in their promise to move beyond the limitations of purely formal institution building, they fail to provide new answers to the ‘old’ analytical and practical challenges of public sector reform, in particular administrative patrimonialism, public corruption and political capture. The evidence is yet inchoate, but all points to the need for these approaches to work together with conventional ones. Beyond novel implementation tactics, however, there is a need for new strategies of sustained political support for embattled reformers who face powerful incentives against institutional change.

Tags Africa Governance Initiative, OGP, PDIA, Public sector reform, Publications

Development España

La cooperación española en la nueva encuesta sobre influencia y utilidad de donantes

Post author By Pablo
Post date 18 December 2015

La organización AidData ha publicado una encuesta de líderes y responsables públicos en países receptores de ayuda en la que se les pregunta si consideran que los donantes con los que trabajan son útiles, sirven de ayuda, o influyen sobre la agenda de desarrollo. El documento final está disponible online. Varios investigadores del Center for Global Development han decidido revisar los resultados en base al número de respuestas recibidos (por ejemplo, Luxemburgo aparece como el cuarto donante más útil, pero este resultado se basa solamente en 18 respuestas de un total de 6.731 participantes). Esta es una de las tablas revisadas por el CGD: