Asia Research Centre - Politics of Development (ADRA)

There is little doubt that development policy is in the process of substantial reappraisal. It is increasingly recognised within the major development organisations and banks that problems of poverty, growth and governance are not so easily resolved simply by the introduction of markets or by policy or institutional reforms, including recent emphasis on the construction of 'good governance'. In particular, policy makers are struggling with the question of what to do with governments that appear to lack any political will to engage the reform process and are themselves resistant to attempts to introduce 'good governance'. They also confront indifference or even hostility to reform from less powerful elements of society that might be expected to embrace reforms aimed at eliminating corruption, political repression and incompetent governance.

One response to these is that institutional and policy reforms have not gone far enough or have been badly designed and sequenced. In particular, the World Bank has been concerned with the design of increasingly targeted institutional reform aimed at reshaping the behaviour of individuals. Increasingly though, more attention is being focused on the way broader political factors influence and constrain reform. Calls for a new political economy approach to development have emphasised the importance of understanding the architecture of economic and political power and how various interests attempt to shape the direction of change. Such an understanding, it is thought, might enable policies that can mobilise potentially progressive groups and interests behind the reform agenda. Such initiatives have been pioneered by the British Department for International Development (DFID) through it work on 'drivers of change' and by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) with its focus on 'power analysis'. More recently the World Bank itself and the Australian Aid Agency (AusAID) have begun to look at ways of increasing the 'demand for governance' within civil society itself.

However, recognising that politics plays an important part in shaping and constraining the options for policy makers in the development field has proven much easier than accommodating or harnessing these processes in practical policy agendas. Increasing attention is being paid to the question of how and whether politics can be incorporated into the design of development policy. This study pulls this debate together and builds on it, introducing some new perspectives and questions. In particular, we ask two main questions: Does this awareness of political economy represent a genuinely new way of understanding politics and society and how conflicts over power influence the development process? Has political economy been successfully incorporated into new policy frameworks and opened the door to new ways of thinking about development policy? One central aspect of our study is that the development debate is not one between political economy approaches and those that emphasise market and institutional reform. Rather, we argue that institutional and policy approaches have always embodied implicit notions of politics and the real conflict is between different understandings of political economy and the nature of good policy, good institutions and good governance.

Most important, we bring to these attempts at using political economy a new way of looking at the problem. Rather than focusing on actors or even groups as the key aspects of the problem, our approach is focused on the networks and relationships within which they are situated and which define the allocation of power and wealth. Local policies and practices, and partner governments may be embedded in relationships of power that depend upon forms of governance different to those being proposed. For example, it may be pointless to try to mobilise peasant farmers within new forms of agrarian governance where they are beholden to specific elites for finance or land in a network of relationships that require opaque and corrupt forms of governance. To an important extent, the governance problem is therefore re-defined from one that addresses immediate aspects of efficiency, transparency and accountability in a generic sense towards one that addresses reorganisation of networks and relationships in the direction of reform.

The entire monograph produced for the Dec 2010 Conference is now available as a draft monograph in pdf