Duncan Green’s FP2P blog recently featured a self-described rant about the disconnect between academic debates on aid and actual aid practice. Judging by the number of comments and twitter responses, by practitioners but mostly by academics, you could say he has hit a nerve in our little development studies community. Many of my academic colleagues and friends were disappointed with Duncan’s apparent simplification and stereotyping of development scholarship. I have a slightly different take, based on my personal experience. Why does my personal experience matter at all? Well, I did get a PhD in an American political science department (as academic as it gets), then for five years I worked at a DFID-funded research centre in a UK development studies department (meant to influence policy), and then over the last two years I have been working as an aid practitioner. And my sense is that while Duncan’s rant is justified, the apportioning of blame needs to be much more nuanced. Continue reading Duncan Green’s rant is not wrong. But the blame does not lie only in academia
Category: Research
“Varieties of state-building in Africa”: New comparative paper on public sector reform
ESID has just released my new working paper on comparative PSR in Ghana, Uganda, and Rwanda: “Varieties of state-building in Africa: Elites, ideas and the politics of public sector reform“.
Here’s the abstract, followed by the download link:
Why do some states in Africa seem to be stuck in a spiral of corruption and institutional weakness? Why do others somehow build effective bureaucracies that are able and willing to tackle the challenges of development? The public sector remains the inescapable anchor of development, whether for good or ill, but our understanding of the politics of public sector reform remains shackled by concepts that do not allow for variation or change over time. This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding variations in public sector reform (PSR): centring the analysis on the intersection of power relations and ideas, the paper shows how the stability of a country’s elite settlement and the coherence of its developmental ideology interact with reform ideas in the PSR policy domain. This framework is explored through a structured-focused comparison of reform experiences in three Sub-Saharan African countries with different elite settlements: competitive Ghana; weakly dominant Uganda; and dominant Rwanda. In Ghana, where successive regimes have focused on political control for partisan purposes, it has been quick reforms compatible with top-down control that have achieved political traction. In Uganda, high-visibility reforms were introduced to secure donor funding, as long as they did not threaten the ruling coalition’s power. In Rwanda, lastly, the regime has fostered and protected various public sector reforms because it envisioned them as instruments for domestic legitimation as constituent elements of an impartial developmental state. In combination, policy domain, elite time horizons, and ideational fit allow us to move beyond blanket statements about isomorphic mimicry or neopatrimonialism, and towards a more nuanced understanding of the varieties of state-building in Africa.