It’s been a while since I was able to sit down and write – life happens. But today I wanted to resume my PEA Confessions in order to think out loud about how we incorporate political and context analysis in aid/development projects. Back when I joined this community six years ago, one of the most interesting pieces I found was a paper by Heather Marquette and Jonathan Fisher on how to take PEA from product to process. This was before the evolution of the Thinking and Working Politically community of practice that we see today, and before approaches like “everyday political analysis”.
While I subscribe fully to the limitations of PEA reports, I also understand why such products are more frequent than PEA processes: it is easy to draft terms of reference for them, there’s a more or less obvious pool of potential writers, and the deliverables are tangible and easy to measure. Mainstreaming PEA beyond reports is much harder, of course, for a number of reasons: organizational cultures, procurement imperatives, misguided M&E expectations… But at the micro-level – the level of implementation – I am starting to think that a better heuristic for the constrained space for PEA processes would entail talking about floors and ceilings. Continue reading PEA Confessions, part IV: Of floors and ceilings